


The Sea on a Moonless Night

by lastdream



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel Noir
Genre: Adventure, Brainwashing, M/M, Magic, Non-serious Injury, Situational Peril, Violence, extreme artistic license with Norse mythology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-20 14:27:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12434712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lastdream/pseuds/lastdream
Summary: The War is over, and adventuring is good: Tony Stark has plenty of fans, and a brand new rival, and enough artifacts to find to last him a lifetime. His friends have found themselves even bigger and better callings of their own—so what does it matter if he's a little lonely? He's fine. He's doing what he loves. Still hoping to find a cure for his broken heart, and ready to head into the trials and tunnels of a new adventure, Tony has set his sights on volcanic Iceland. He doesn't expect the journey to be easy, but even he isn't counting on the mysterious man with a knack for stealing his leads.





	The Sea on a Moonless Night

**Author's Note:**

> This is my work for the 2017 Winteriron Bang! This year I worked with [UchihaNa](http://archiveofourown.org/users/UchihaNa), who did the fantastic watercolor, and with [Wren](http://massivespacewren.tumblr.com), who not only made me lovely art but also designed the banner for this story :) I embedded everything in the story, but you can also find UchihaNa’s art [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12444825), and Wren's is [here](http://massivespacewren.tumblr.com/post/166658587503/my-art-for-the-winteriron-bang-go-read-the)—go show these artists the love they deserve! Seeing the art that people make is definitely my favorite part of writing for a Big Bang :) 
> 
> I also have to give lots of credit to [dapperanachronism](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dapperanachronism), who was a very helpful and encouraging beta on very short notice (because I was _so late_ writing this story, you have no idea), and to [Caz](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Lanidzac), whose cheerleading probably saved this story and its author from dissolving into a puddle of pure frustration <3
> 
> FINALLY, A NOTE ABOUT **SPOILERS:**
> 
> This story is set some years after the end of the Iron Man Noir comic series, and it includes major spoilers for that universe. If you don't want to be spoiled, turn back now! (On the other hand, I can absolutely recommend the series—it has Tony living in the forties and basically being Indiana Jones :D Also, it's only four issues long.)

 

The Winter Soldier wakes. He remains still while the tubes are removed from his throat, his nose, his veins. When he can, he stands.

There is a Baron there, his face covered and his hands gloved. A different one, the Soldier thinks, though it doesn’t matter. Time doesn’t mean anything to him. It is nothing, to wait while the hooded man regards him.

“You are functional, Soldier?” the Baron asks.

German, the Soldier thinks.

“Ja,” he replies.

“And your weapon?” the Baron continues.

The Soldier concentrates. His weapon wakes from the sedatives more slowly than he does, but it is stirring. It regards the man and notes the spindly, fragile shape of his neck beneath the hood.

“Also functional,” the Soldier states.

“Good, good,” the Baron says. “We have a mission for you.”

There is always a mission. The Soldier says nothing.

The Baron gives him provisions, instructions, armor, a map of southern Iceland. It is a retrieval mission, and it is not complicated.

“This artifact is vital to the restoration of Hydra,” the Baron explains. “You must return it intact, do you understand?”

“Yes,” the Soldier says. He serves Hydra. He will bring back this thing. The weapon shifts restlessly at his side.

They are ready.

 

* * *

 

“Up you get, time to move.”

The voice is sharp, and Tony finally looks away from the broad window wall; the airship is hovering low for the drop, and under the rising of the immortal Midsummer sun, the sea looks like it goes on forever. Shimmering with glaciers, the island itself maintains the illusion. There isn’t a ship, vehicle, or even a hiker in sight.

Good. No one, not even an absurdly brave Hydra adventurer with a knack for stealing Tony’s leads, has followed him this time. He still hasn’t forgiven the Winter Soldier for knocking him out at the Anóteros crater that first time.

“Already?” Tony asks. “Have you—“

“Yes,” Jarvis says flatly. “I’ve pushed the buttons to steer us into position, pushed the button to open the hatch, and I’ve even put myself to the trouble of looking at the display, which seems to say that the repulsor pump has been fully charged for at least ten minutes.”

Well, Jarvis has never been stupid. When Tony doesn’t move on his own, Jarvis sighs without heat and yanks the bundle of cords one by one from his chest. His face is frustrated, but his hands, as ever, are gentle. The metal plate clicks shut over Tony’s heart.

“Next time you want to make an old man feel useful, try to do it _without_ cluttering up my charging bay, eh?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Tony lies. He shrugs his shirts on, tugs his suspenders up over the sleeves, leaves his jacket on the hook. It’s June, and he’ll be underground soon enough.

“Maybe I want you to do all the work whilst _I_ sit and watch the glaciers,” says Jarvis, and Tony can’t help a snort. Even now, his work done, Jarvis is determinedly following him down the corridor to the drop hatch.

“You know, Reykjavik’s not far…“ Tony begins.

“I’m not sure I like where this is going.“

“C’mon, Jarvis, it’s two hours—one, if you push it—and you can get some new supplies, sleep dirtside, maybe go to one of those great steam rooms…”

He can see the moment when Jarvis allows himself to be convinced, concedes that he’d rather be terrorizing vendors than idling his airship over the top of a volcano, even if it _has_ been silent for almost forty years. It’s a little victory.

“One condition,” Jarvis states. “You _will_ radio for pickup. I do not need to pull your arse out of a crevasse because you decided you could make it out on your own.”

“Done.” Tony grins as he grabs his pack from the hook on the wall. His heart feels young and alive, the way it does right after he’s been unplugged, the way it does when he’s about to drop into a brand new adventure and discover something impossible. Through the hatch, he can see the rope ladder waving in the breeze. He can see the stone slopes of Katla, the stubborn mosses, the blaze of sunlight where heavy ice encroaches on them both. He imagines he can already see the entrance, opened wide by the blaze of Midsummer sunlight.

“Do be careful,” Jarvis says, as always.

“See you tomorrow,” Tony replies. He salutes sloppily, and he descends.

 

*

 

The first few hundred feet of the tunnel look like nothing more than ordinary cave walls under the steady light of Tony’s electric globe lamp, but he’s seen enough hidden temples to know better. An odd square corner of volcanic rock, an easy path over a jagged patch in the floor—this is a passageway dressed up as a lava tube. He’s on the right track. A few turns in the right direction, a mile or two deeper into the earth, and then…

Iðunn’s Cup awaits.

After a while, the tunnel branches, branches again, and then stops pretending to be naturally occurring. The floor evens out, the ceiling rounds, and strange shimmering streaks appear on the walls. They, too, seem natural at first, little more than dusky trails reflecting the lamplight, but soon they join and twist together into thick outlines, and they begin to tell stories.

Tony slows. Characters edged in tarnished silver, set with startling eyes of iolite like little stars, bright and cool as Winter. This is where he wishes he still had an adventurous chronicler and not just a camera.

There is Tyr, the man who gave his hand to trap the wolf and save his people, and there is Eir, the forge-goddess and healer. There are the ravens Hugin and Munin who travel the world to bring back news, spiraling around each other and flying through the other stories. Most of the murals that Tony photographs depict the legends he recognizes, from mythology or from all the research he did to find this place. Most are familiar; one is not.

The story he does not know begins with Iðunn, and with her brother, and with a man who can only be her husband, Bragi. It begins with the iconography of friendship and trust, as though the two men had been brothers in arms. Next there’s something about a goat, and a tree, and suddenly Iðunn’s brother and Bragi are fighting to the death.

Tony takes a few steps backwards. The story probably needs a proper skald to tell it, but the second time he looks, he sees the tiny apple emblazoned over the tree—it must belong to Iðunn, then. Tony still isn’t sure what’s going on, but he guesses that the characters themselves might not, either. It wouldn’t be the first bizarre misunderstanding he’s read about in Norse mythology, and it wouldn’t be the weirdest one, either.

The important thing, he gathers, is that some debt of honor has been incurred. Some impossible circumstance that forces brothers in arms to take up arms against one another. Tony knows from other myths what happens next: Iðunn’s brother will be killed, and Iðunn will fall in love with his killer.

But the image he sees is more complicated than that.

Beside the wounded body of her brother, Iðunn embraces Bragi, injured as well, but there are tears on her face, and there is _something_ bright and glinting between them. Tony brings his lamp nearer to get a better look, and finds another little apple inlaid into the wall, this one made of amber. One of Iðunn’s apples of youth, perhaps? Or a symbol for her Cup? Leaning in too close to the wall, Tony’s footing rocks and he smacks his forehead on stone. He rubs at the spot, steadies himself, and studies the mural a little more carefully. In the next and final panel, the brother has already died and Bragi is drinking from the Cup himself, looking none too happy about it. The Cup was said to have healing powers, so if Iðunn had been trying to save her brother when he died—if she had lost him and then healed and loved his killer anyway—

Tony loses his balance again, barely catching himself on the wall as the world seems to go unsteady around him. Adrenaline spikes. His footing isn’t the problem.

Another, stronger tremor passes through the ground, and it takes all his strength to stay upright.  His fascination with the story evaporates instantly. Rock groans threateningly under his feet, and on his right—toward safety and open air—the few fragile, igneous stalactites begin to shake loose and shatter on the floor.

There’s no time to do anything but snatch up his pack and _run_.

 

*

 

Tony stops when the dust clears, panting and cursing the seismograph readings that hadn’t given him a single damn sign of an _earthquake_. It had been mild enough that he doesn’t think there’s going to be a real eruption—maybe even mild enough to escape the seismographs back in Reykjavik, though that doesn’t seem very likely—but down here, where the earth’s crust is thinner and the sea of magma already has ancient channels and pressure vents, _mild_ is relative. Something in the mountain has definitely changed. He needs to get out of here.

Except—except that Midsummer has nearly passed. If he doesn’t go now, it’ll be at least a year until he can try for the Cup again, and probably longer. If Tony remembers his maps, and he’s sure he does, the artifact chamber is only a few twists and long corridors away. It isn’t far. He’s still on the right track.

For seconds that feel endless, Tony bites his lips and vacillates in place, but in the end it’s a snap decision. There’s no time for anything else.

He keeps going.

The faster he gets to the artifact, the faster he can get out, and that’ll have to be good enough.

 

*

 

It’s less than a hundred yards from the artifact chamber that Tony gets the first sign that something is wrong.

Something besides the possible collapse or explosion of the mountain, that is.

He turns left, then right, then carries on for twenty paces, then left again, and then he finds himself in a large, round gallery, pierced by nine identical entrances. They are like yawning mouths, deep and threatening, disappearing into the gloom only feet from the crossroads.

This hadn’t been on any of the maps.

Tony stops to dig chalk out of his bag and mark the tunnel he’d come from, and then he begins to pace the entryway. Is it a trap? Is the real artifact even here? It’s possible that all that writing about Katla had been created just to throw the hapless explorer off of some other scent, perhaps now lost to the ages. It’s equally possible that all that writing had been genuine, and intentionally incomplete.

That’s when he finds the second sign that something is wrong.

Most of the ground is stony and hard, but pressed into the patches of stagnant dust, once like a trick of the eye, then twice and undeniable, there are boot prints, so clear that he doesn’t know how he hadn’t seen them before.

One set of boot prints.

It’s probably not Winter. Hydra is dying—it has been for years, ever since Cap turned cold and deadly in the War—and there have to be more than two people in the world stupid enough to venture into a place like this alone. Besides, there might be a whole other set of prints lost on the rock floor.

But whether or not Winter is off somewhere smirking about yet another prize taken out from under Tony’s nose isn’t the important thing. The important thing is that someone got here first. Someone got here first, and now the Cup of Iðunn the Rejuvenator is almost certainly miles away and stinking of naphthalene in some stuffy-suited dragon’s hoard. Tony snaps a picture of one of the boot prints and chalks the tunnel they lead to. There has to be a trace, a clue, some lead he can chase down.

If any artifact could solve his heart, the Cup would be it. He won’t give up that easily.

 

*

 

When Tony reaches the heart of the temple, for a moment he completely forgets about his quest and his hurry. The chamber is vast and spacious, echoing in its size, glittering in its grandeur. Bright metal catches the light of the lamp and carries it out in endless ripples, illuminating the shadows and throwing delicate pillars of frozen lava into relief. After the miles of dark tunnels, the ambience is like stepping into moonlight.

And there, at the far end of the chamber, rising from a dished platform long ago carved smooth—

 

“Hey there, Iðunn,” Tony murmurs. He takes pictures of the chamber, of the statue, and wishes he had a wider shot to get it all together. The goddess stands at least ten feet tall, her intricate robes rippling into bronzed auburn hair, her eyes closed, her arms stretched out to embrace—or to offer.

In her hands is an open wooden box, and Tony would bet anything it’s made of treated ash. An ash-wood chest to hold Iðunn’s apples of immortality; an ash-wood case to hold her Cup. It’s still in the case, half visible and sparkling in the lamplight.

It’s still here, and all at once Tony realizes that he hadn’t seen even one boot print leading _back_ the way he’d come.

His rival adventurer is still here, too.

The sense of haste returns as though it had never left, fluttering Tony’s fingers as his ears strain to listen. He hears to the echo of his breath on stone, the thunder of his pulse beneath the repulsor pump, and beyond that, nothing. The silence of the chamber seems a lot less empty, and a lot more _alive_. It seems predatory.

Long, anxious seconds pass, and still nothing happens.

But time is still a factor, and he can’t just stand here. He shoves down the adrenaline stress. Being silent doesn’t matter. If he’s loud enough to hear himself so clearly, then he’s loud enough for the other adventurer to hear him, too.

If it _is_ Winter, Tony already knows that he’ll never hear him coming.

And so, feeling more reckless than brave, Tony starts forward. He tucks the camera safely away and trades it for his gun, wishing more than a little that he could fit the Iron Man armor into these tunnels. The floor must once have sloped smoothly toward the center, but the years and the seismic activity have made it uneven and ragged, forcing him to pick his way more carefully, and sometimes to clutch at the columns with his free right hand as he scrambles down. He can’t help tensing every time every time he sends loose rocks skittering over the floor.

The closer Tony gets, the taller Iðunn seems to grow, throwing a dramatic shadow onto the chamber wall. She could hide the other adventurer. Any of these pillars could. Even reflecting from dozens of metal traceries, glinting on the Cup in Iðunn’s hands, the lamplight doesn’t seem like nearly enough.

There’s still no sign of the other person who _must_ be there. Lack of evidence is not evidence in itself, and yet Tony can’t help being somehow sure that it’s—

Another tremor groans through the earth, less violent than the others, but more than enough to send him down hard, the lamp flying off to one side, a heart-stopping shower of scree bursting from the impact. The gun remains clutched in his left hand, thankfully, but it jams his wrist something fierce when it hits the ground.

“Dammit,” Tony hisses. Time’s up. Time’s past up. He clambers to his feet and calls out, “Look, I don’t want to get buried alive in here any more than you do! What say we get out of here first, fight over the find later?”

There is no answer.

Cursing again under his breath, Tony makes his way over to retrieve the lamp. It shows a stain on his fingers, surfaces a drifting scent that he knows far too well, and he holsters his gun quickly so that he can check himself over. It’s a faster operation than he would have expected; his clothes aren’t even torn. All he has are scratches on his arms and a stinging place where his chin clipped rock, and none of it is bleeding freely. The blood in the air, on the floor where his hand fell—it’s not his. It can’t be.

“Hey, are you alright out there?” Tony calls, following the dried traces on the ground. Then, on the off chance that it _is_ a civilian, he adds, “I’m not going to hurt you!”

Again there is no response, and soon enough the reason for that is plain. The lamplight travels so well in the heights of the chamber, but _there_ , behind a jagged outcropping, it is suddenly swallowed up by a chasm, caught by the sharp edges of stone freshly cleaved. It glints on another smear of dried blood, dark and dull.

Tony might not be the only one who’d taken a tumble when the earth shook.

“Anyone down there?” he shouts. Part of him wants to drop a rock to judge the distance, but if there really is someone down there… “Are you there?” he tries again, in his rough Icelandic this time, and then in German for Winter’s benefit.

This time, finally, there is an answer. It isn’t intelligible, isn’t even _words_ , but it is human, and Tony sags with relief all the same. There’s been a wasp in the room all this time, and at last he knows where it is. He knows _who_ it is, though neither the pessimist nor the Marvels producer in him had ever had much doubt. He glances up at the Cup, still sparkling at him from Iðunn’s offering hands, and then he looks back down at the yawning void.

“You’re not actually going to do this, are you?” Tony mutters to himself, exasperated. “You’re not actually dumb enough to risk the whole adventure in a dark hole that probably has your most dangerous rival at the bottom, without knowing how deep it is, in the middle of a restless volcano. You’re not.”

He’s already getting out the rope.

 

*

 

With one hand feeding rope into a figure-eight descender, the other still clutching his gun, and the lamp jammed into his belt, Tony rappels down. He thinks he’s more or less balanced his risks and precautions—and he’s certainly not brave enough to put the gun down at a time like this—but he’s already made up his mind that he has to survive in order to never, ever tell Jarvis about this. Ever. It was bad enough he’d kept going after the earthquakes, and now he’d taken the silent darkness of the pit as an invitation.

But Winter hadn’t responded to the rope he’d thrown down, and silent darkness or no, Tony’s never really known how to give up. At least he’s only putting _himself_ in danger this time.

Once he’s inside the abyss, he finds that it isn’t truly silent. In the claustrophobic space between stone walls, even quiet sounds are magnified, reflected, confounded, until they seem to come from everywhere. Tony is surrounded by his own breathing, the scrape of his boots on stone, the quiet slither of the rope, and—

And then another sound, alien, slowly driving him insane: a faint rasp of effortful breath, like a whimper. Pained, fearful, or both. This is the same Winter who blindsided him at the Anóteros crater, the same man who beat Tony’s lead to the Otago caves. It seems like a bad joke.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Tony hazards quietly, in German again. A lie, under most circumstances, but he doesn’t want to leave _anyone_ to die in the dark in a volcano.

He thinks it probably still sounds like a lie, with the gun in his hand.

Tony slides down the last several feet of rope and lets go as soon as he meets solid ground. He lifts the lamp high, but even so it’s hard to judge the dimensions of the cave; the air down here is crammed with dust, and the light doesn’t travel far.

“Hey, where are you?” he asks. There’s no answer, but he thinks he sees an indistinct movement in the shadows and he steps closer, though he can’t move far from the rope he’s still tethered to. German is one of his better languages, luckily.  “Are you hurt badly? I saw blood up above. I have a few bandages at least. I know how to take care of broken bones, too. I’m sure we can figure something out.” Still there is no response. “There’s not much time. Come on, let’s just get the Cup and get out of he—“

He never gets to finish his sentence. Winter surges out of the darkness like lightning, all speed and violence; Tony fires without even thinking, loud as thunder and ringing off the stone. It’s a wing shot, and Tony couldn’t miss this close even if he wanted to, but Winter doesn’t even slow down. He’s on Tony in a second, grabbing the barrel heedlessly with that same arm, twisting hard with a gloved hand. Tony drops the gun. Time slows down. His fingers begin to shake with adrenaline, and the lamp falls to the floor and rolls in meaningless arcs, forgotten.

That isn’t possible. It _shouldn’t_ be possible. Even Cap, for all his obstinacy, could never have shrugged off a bullet wound like that.

Hydra can’t outdo Erskine. It’s not possible. It’s _wrong_.

Tony hits the ground and the breath goes out of him. The Winter Soldier has him pinned and disarmed, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. Strong, _strong_ fingers wrap around Tony’s throat in a frantic and fumbling blood choke and he snarls like a wild thing, his filthy hair falling into his face, his eyes savage with rage in the shadows. An injured beast.

How _long_ has he been trapped down here?

All right. All right. Tony takes a deep breath, already lightheaded, and then he takes another one. His mind is still running in circles, _it isn’t possible_ , but right now the most important thing is getting out of here alive.

“Shh, you’ll be fine, we’ll get out of here, I can get you a doctor, I can…” It’s nonsense, like trying to calm a spooked animal, and Tony thinks it’s working, thinks that the heaving breath is starting to slow and calm, but the grip around his throat doesn’t loosen. His vision is swimming, the lamp rolling in and out of his field of vision like some mad pendulum. Consciousness, too, is beginning to slip away.

Those water-sapphire eyes look so bright.

“Just let me help you,” he murmurs, and then Winter does.

 

* * *

 

The earthquake settles and the Winter Soldier staggers to his feet. From the echoes, he knows he is in a stone fissure with steep sides. From the pain, he knows it is several meters deep. Fragments of light oscillate in front of him, but he knows it is still dark.

Immediately, the Soldier tries to climb free. The Cup is not far. He sets his weapon to the wall and uses it to hold his weight and balance secure as he hauls himself upward, moving as quickly as he can. One foot steps higher, finds solid rock, and the other follows. His body curls against the wall like a spider, and then he re-situates his weapon and does it again, and again.

The bottom of the wall is rough and rocky, almost ladder-like to climb, but this changes quickly. Soon, the holds are few and far between, small, supporting only the very toes of his boots and tips of his fingers. Then the holds disappear altogether. Nothing to grasp, nowhere to step.

It does not daunt him, but it makes him think. Of course it will not be so simple as a straight vertical walk.

The Soldier leans against the wall and stretches his weapon out. Just out of his range there will be something to grip, something he can reach with a jump—and there is. His weapon can sense it, perhaps a meter above. He could make it with his boots well braced. He could make it with his hand pushing off of the place his weapon is latched to the wall. Breathing deeply for strength, he wedges his boots firmly into their narrow holds, curls the fingers of his bare right hand into the little notch of stone, springs upwards—

The force of the jump is adequate, but the strength of his arm is not. It gives in under the pain and the damage sustained in his earlier fall. The bones within grind against each other audibly, and the ligaments go slack.

Unable to catch a grip on the smooth stone, the Soldier falls to the ground. In his head, the pain increases. He gets heavily to his feet, closes his eyes briefly.

_Broken and wounded in the dark, waiting to escape and waiting and waiting and then waiting only to die—_

But the memory is half-forgotten, faint. This time, the Soldier will get out.

Walking around the narrow crevice opened by the earthquake, he seeks another place to ascend to the artifact chamber. He finds one that seems less sheer, better shaped for climbing, and he begins. There is a throbbing in his right arm, but he moves quickly; his body is easy to ignore. On this wall, too, he finds a place impassable for his damaged arm. It is not so hard to fall this time. He had only climbed a few meters.

Again and again, the Soldier tries. He pauses to allow his weapon to set the fractures in his right arm, and he tries once more.

Time seems to pass more quickly with every attempt, marked only by the pulsation in his skull and the sense of his weapon. With every failure he becomes more aware of the possibility of one greater: that he might not retrieve the Cup that Hydra has sent him here to retrieve.

He has never failed a mission before.

Again and again, the Soldier falls.

The half-day remaining becomes hours, and the hours become minutes, and the brief northern summer night is drawing closer. He does not stop trying; he cannot. To the end he cannot give up on his mission.

Then, at last, the solstice slips away.

 

*

 

There is no protocol for the Winter Soldier’s death.

This, he observes, is an oversight.

It had not been a complicated mission. There had been few projected obstructions. Perhaps the Baron’s omission had reflected the improbability of failure, in view of the Soldier’s adaptive skillset.

No skillset is universal; it is still an oversight.

In the dark, there is no Baron to rectify the situation, so the Soldier must deal with the fault as best he can. It is difficult for his mind. He is not meant to create his own protocols—but this must be an exception.

First, the Soldier examines the possessions on his person. He has a stock of food for one more day, which he sets aside. He has his armor, which covers even his weapon and has protected all but his shattered right arm from the worst of the fall. It is still in order, and it will preserve his heat. He has the information he received from Hydra before beginning his mission; this he destroys. He has his weapon.

His weapon has been instrumental in many missions and eliminations. Its loss will be the most serious blow to Hydra, and this is inadmissible. The Soldier attempts to remove the weapon, so as to allow it to find a way back to Hydra alone, but it will not be removed from its source of energy. It is angry. It will consume him before hunger does.

Something else, too, is vital but impossible: the mission has ended, even if not how it was meant to, and the Soldier knows that he must make his report to Hydra. It is an imperative in his mind, as strong as the drive to retrieve the Cup. He draws in air and considers.

If he cannot report to the Baron or another officer of Hydra, he can report to his weapon, and his weapon will remember.

“Arrhi—“ the Soldier begins, and stops. There is pain in his throat. He drinks water from his provisions and restarts. “Arrived seventeenth June at the indicated location, on schedule. Used daylight hours to scout the region near the volcano base, duration approximately twenty hours, per maps received from the Baron…”

This not the intended function of his weapon, and not one it desires; it twists him with frustration. There is more pain, but this is an imperative. The Soldier cannot stop now that he has begun. He continues his description chronologically: it had been the fourth day of his investigation, the twentieth, when he had identified an artificial cave among the natural formations of the volcano. There had been a chill, but the temperature had been no impediment to his weapon, and so he had made camp in the cave mouth that night.

He recalls that a strange, aversive instinct had risen in him in the night, disliking the dark or the cold or the stone of the cave, but it had not been relevant to the mission. This, he does not say.

He says that he had waited for the early sunrise of the solstice, and then he had gone in.

Inside, the volcano had been a network of challenges and traps. Many had been likewise artificial, and easy to bypass: the maze of tunnels, mapped and recorded by the weapon; the long climb, after the equipment rope had been lost; the crossroads, meant to confuse one who lacks a perfect sense of orientation. Other barriers had been created by seismic activity in more recent times. They had been—they had—

He masters himself. Difficulty is an irrelevant parameter.

They had not been made with solutions, but he had solved them nonetheless.

After several hours of travel, and with several hours of the day remaining, he had arrived at the central chamber of the volcano temple. He had seen the Cup, and his mind had latched to it as the object of his mission. It was for him, it was for Hydra. He had only to retrieve what already belonged to them.

Part of his mind had been humming with satisfaction, thinking of a mission completed with time to spare. This, he reflects, had been a mistake.

He had crossed half the distance to the Cup when the ground had begun to shake. The first tremor had been gentle, and would have been easy to ignore without the warning of his weapon, but the second—as it predicted—was much more violent. The third had cracked the earth with such force that the Soldier had been thrown across the rocky floor and into the widening gap.

Even the weapon’s strong grip had not been enough to keep hold of the surface. Rock had crumbled under the force, and the Soldier had fallen.

Escape, he reports simply, had proved impossible.

This is enough explanation to reach the present time, and the Soldier relaxes, his need fulfilled. He has ordered his equipment and prepared his information. He will die in service to Hydra, and on the next solstice a new Soldier may come to retrieve Hydra’s weapon.

That is an acceptable protocol.

 

*

 

The next day, the Soldier has slept, and some of the pain of his injuries has passed away. Some remains; he ignores it. He consumes his final ration, and he tries again to get to the Cup.

It is no more possible now than it was before.

But for the imperative of his mission, over but not accomplished, he is not sure why he tries. The previous day’s failures had been consistent and instructive: it will not _be_ possible until his right arm functions properly, and healing will take longer than starving. His time ran out with the solstice. His improvised protocol is already complete.

With nothing else to do in the dark, he repeats the protocol. He organizes his reduced possessions. He orders his armor and uses it to shield himself when further tremors bring fragmentary rock down from the top of the chasm. He attempts again to remove his weapon to save it. And he begins—

“Arrived seventeenth June at the indicated location, on schedule. Used daylight…”

He cannot remember daylight. It is not day, and neither is it night; there is no moon in the blackness. He continues.

 

*

 

The Soldier begins to heal, but the pain increases. It is not the pain of the first fall, or any of the others. It is the ache of failure and of bringing harm to his weapon, ever a vital tool for Hydra, and it is the clamoring of the weapon itself as it grinds his broken bones and rages against him for it, too, can die. It is the anger and the frustration and the hatred that do not belong to him.

But he knows how to ignore all this; the mission supplants it. He had been designed for this, a Baron told him once. To continue even when the pain is great.

Again, he repeats his protocol, adjusting steps as his resources change, waiting for the moment it will finally be fulfilled. He does not know how long it will be—the last time, whenever it had been, however it had been, he had survived—but he does know it will be the weapon that uses him up in the end.

He continues. To ignore the pain is to drown it out.

“Arrived seventeenth June at the indicated location…”

 

*

 

And again, when the weapon will not be quieted. It is satisfactory, like obeying orders, though not so effective as a mission for driving away pain and thought. One imperative substitutes for another, but it cannot replace it.

“Arrived seventeenth June…”

 

*

 

He sleeps. He wakes. His first conscious sensation is of the burn in his throat, within and without; his weapon has half throttled him. His orders are self-preservation, and his improvised protocol cannot override them. Eventually, when the earth trembles and distracts them, the weapon is made to withdraw. He repeats the sequence again, only to stop before the end.

“Arrived sevent—“ he begins, and finds that he cannot go on. He cannot make himself speak. There is no more water in his provisions. Amid the hatred, there is a surge of victory like sharp pleasure from his weapon.

His voice is gone.

 

*

 

He sleeps. He wakes. He finds that the weapon, at last, has become still.

There is another voice.

It is too far and too faint for the Soldier to discern any details, but it is enough to make him question the assumption that underlies the protocol he created. The owner of the voice may have been trapped before the solstice ended, but it is also possible that a new entrance has been opened by the seismic activity. If someone has come in, there may be a way out.

The voice is also enough for an immediate classification: Competition.

If he can get out, it may still be possible for him to complete his mission. If he does not, the Cup may be stolen from only meters away. Mere failure to retrieve the artifact for Hydra is nothing to the pain of losing it to someone else.

Once again the Soldier tries to climb free, and for the first time in days he and his weapon are fully in step. It is a relief. He makes his way higher, and higher, and the echoes of the voice become more distinct. There are no identifiable words, but the pitch of it is masculine, and the intonation fluctuates in predictable, familiar ways: English, the Soldier thinks. More likely to be an enemy of Hydra. The weapon curls with eagerness, and he climbs higher.

Soon, the Soldier has nearly reached the height that was impassable to him before, but now, with the renewed motivation of possibility, the chance of accomplishing his mission and gaining the Cup despite a near-fatal setback—

Another quake in the volcano sends him crashing back to the floor of the pit, all his weight on his shattered arm. The edges of the fractures grind together, but he pushes himself up. He has to try again when the earth quiets. The voice is coming closer, but it is not his priority for the moment; he is trying to coax his weapon to set the bone again. He cannot, without it.

“Anyone down there?” the voice calls, now from the mouth of the chasm, echoing but understandable. It is close enough that the threat of theft amplifies in the Soldier’s mind, but he cannot keep from listening. Something in the voice itself catches his ear, and not merely the cadence. Familiar, he thinks. It repeats itself in Icelandic, and then in German clean enough that it might be native. Less likely to be an enemy of Hydra. Something twists in the Soldier’s mind, and he opens his mouth to reply—

His weapon suddenly sets the compound breaks all at once, and the Soldier’s answer is lost in his first cry of pain. The voice above ceases.

It is gone, and the Soldier remains below, and the Cup remains above, and he feels more trapped than ever. He must succeed, he must prevent the theft, but he _cannot_. Pain is sharp and fierce in his head, as though it never left, and for a small eternity he is insensate. He does not silence himself. The failure is all he knows.

 

*

 

It has been minutes, his weapon informs him, when the voice returns. A light accompanies it, and the suddenness of that brilliance burns like fire. There had been no light under the volcano; the Soldier and his weapon need none. He shrinks back into the darkness of the cave, recoiling on himself, willing his eyes to adjust to the blaze. Eventually, they do.

The first thing he can see is the light source itself, round and unflickering: an electric globe. It is not so bright, he realizes. Only the darkness had made it seem so. It takes a moment longer before the Soldier can parse the rest of the shape before his eyes, because the light is not in the Competition’s hand. Rather, it seems to be behind him, perhaps attached to an equipment harness. The man’s hands are busy instead with the rope that lowers him down, and with a gun.

Automatically the classification adjusts in the Soldier’s mind: potential Hostile. That potential fills his weapon with a strange, anticipatory satisfaction, but he ignores it. He hides himself, and he observes.

Slowly, carefully, the man rappels down. He slips occasionally when the rope goes too fast through his right hand, but it is the misstep of a practiced agent. There is no panic, and little fear, and he recovers himself almost instantly. As he comes lower he continues to speak, and the Soldier listens intently. Something in the timbre, or perhaps the intonation, is more familiar than ever.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” is what the man says. “I want to get you out of here.”

Again the Soldier’s mind twists and a new classification fights with the old: potential Ally. The gun is either a precaution or a weapon. The words are either the truth or a lie. He has no way of knowing which, and he waits, caught between two classifications, two protocols, two minds he may be compelled to inhabit. Preferences are irrelevant, but he detests the uncertainty.

When the man’s boots hit the floor, his rope goes slack, and his light is lifted higher. It illuminates the dark and dusty stone cage. It illuminates the man himself, briefly, and the world drops out from underneath the Soldier. He has seen this man before, he knows, but he is not seeing him now.

 _All is violence and haste, and he’s doing exactly what he’s ordered, what he must, but he feels sick at his weapon’s glee, sick in his head, and that voice is gone and that face is falling pale and cold and the Soldier has never felt so directionless before_.

And then it’s over, and the Soldier recoils on himself. His skull is pounding. In his head, his two minds fight. Ally. Hostile.

The man before him is Competition, and he has brought a gun. He is offering medical attention, and he has brought a rope. He is looking in the dark corners, and it will not be long until he finds the Soldier. Until the Soldier _must_ classify him.

“I’m sure we can figure something out,” the man is saying. That low German voice does not sound like the enemies the Soldier knows. “There’s not much time left. Come on, let’s just get the Cup and get out of—“

 _Hostile_. The Cup is his, it must be his, he must claim it for Hydra. It is vital. Tired and voiceless, the Soldier finds the strength to spring from his place hidden in the cave. A gunshot rings out and stuns weapon, but it is irrelevant. All that matters is disarming his Competition, immobilizing it, eliminating the threat to Hydra. The lamp rolls in dizzying circles, but his dehydration, too, is irrelevant. Satisfaction goes through him as his weapon scrambles to clench around the man’s throat. It is weakened by the shock and distracted by a strange energy under the man’s skin, but it manages eventually to block the carotid artery; this will be over soon.

But the man is still talking. His voice slurs, and slips out of coherence and once or twice into English, but he is talking. He is still offering aid.

_That face, long before it goes white, looking at the Soldier with pale eyes as he gives the injections, and they hurt—but he is the only one who gives the pain gently._

Slowing down, the light rolls closer, showing hazy, half-conscious eyes, lips moving ceaselessly. Gathering air to say something more. The weapon does not let go, but the Soldier’s body goes soft as he watches that face move. A Hostile would not come here to be destroyed. A Hostile would not act like this under duress, would never be so—so— _kind_ to him.

 _Ally_. It has been so long since the Soldier had an Ally, and it will be _good_ , he thinks, for once not foe but—

The weapon still does not let go.

It should release. It must. The Soldier’s classifications have always bound them both, in action and inaction, yet now it clenches obstinately around an Ally’s throat. Once again the Soldier feels at sea at the end of his protocols.

“Just let me help you,” the man breathes beneath him, the last of his air.

The Soldier does not know what to do, until he does. His weapon too is an Ally, but it must obey. He redirects his strength, what is stored in his body, what is left of his broken arm, and he makes it release as he has never done before. The pain is intense. It is strong, and stronger than he is, but at last he opens his eyes and finds that the constriction has loosened. Blood flows in his Ally’s brain again, and an airless gasp passes his lips.

After several minutes the lightheadedness seems to pass, and the man’s eyes clear. He recovers his lamp and sets it between rocks so it will no longer roll. When it is steady he gropes for the end of the rope he had lowered, fumbling with metal pieces sewn into his equipment harness.

“You are functional, Ally?” the Soldier asks him. His voice has not fully returned, but he is understandable, or at least he believes himself to be, until the Ally looks up quizzically. Perhaps his mind is still clouded from the weapon’s attack.

“I’ll be alright,” the man says a moment later. “You’re not going to strangle me again, are you?”

It is a ridiculous question. He has been classified as an Ally, and elimination is impossible—yet elimination was attempted, and the Ally did fire on the weapon. It is not the perfect classification Hydra trained the Soldier for.

“I will not,” he says seriously. There is a surge of pain from his weapon and he ignores it.

“Uh, good.” The Ally pauses and untangles his rope, sliding his hands along it to remove some invisible twist in the webbing. As he does this, the Soldier informs him of his injuries, at which the Ally seems surprised, but not unprepared. “When we get up top, the rest of my supplies will be there, and I can get you a splint and some water for that throat—will you be able to climb one-handed?” he asks.

The Soldier assesses. His arm is broken and weak, but his weapon is strong. It is angry, but it will not allow him to die. It is not suicidal.

“I can,” he answers.

With the rope seemingly straightened, his Ally leans in close to the Soldier’s body to loop it through the straps of his uniform. There is again that strange energy where they come into contact, like and yet unlike the bright feeling of living things under the weapon’s touch.

_Darkness, a blaze of light on the ground and fading, the burn of a mission under his skin, the thrill of success, and then the world is silver, silver, silver—_

It is an old memory, and stubborn. The Soldier holds onto it.

Then the work on the Soldier’s straps is finished and the Ally runs the rope through his own harness, rethreading it into the metal figure-eight. He makes a loose pattern and then tightens it carefully.

“There,” the man says triumphantly. “It’s not exactly ideal, but hopefully this’ll be able to catch us before we fall all thirty feet down. You’re lucky you only broke that arm, you know.”

The Soldier knows it was the weapon’s efforts more than luck, and he trusts the safety knot more than the man, but he cocks his head and says nothing. The weapon is covered for a reason. They go to the wall, and they climb.

When the Soldier slips where he had in his previous attempts, there is another body there to catch him. When he finds nowhere to put his weapon or his hand, there is a rope to grip and pull. When he finally hauls himself back into the upper cavern, there is a full leather pack with splint and gauze and water waiting for him. He drinks, nearly drowning himself with the thirst of it, while the other man winds the rope back into the pack.

It is good, having an Ally.

 

*

 

Time is short, but no matter how fiercely his weapon insists, the Soldier cannot leave without the Cup, and his Ally seems to share his urgency. Neither of them can abandon the mission here.

It takes some minutes over the uneven stone—they do not trust the mountain’s dormancy—but soon they reach the far end of the chamber. Up to that point the ground has angled downwards, but suddenly there are two rising slopes, two platforms side by side just before the statue of Iðunn. Her stone image is immense, half again as large as either of the two men, and her hands are held out at eye level. Within them the artifact reflects the light: smooth taupe and bright silver leaves and a gleam of inlaid amber, one perfect little golden apple and places where others might once have been. The thought is not relevant, but the Soldier thinks that this is a beautiful thing to bring to Hydra. For a moment, both men simply look.

“You’re more of a horn, aren’t you?” the Ally murmurs. He speaks in English now that he is not speaking to the Soldier, and though it is not a deception, something in the Soldier’s mind bends, the imperfect classification slipping for a second. “Though I suppose,” the man goes on, fascinated and longing, “that _cup_ is a rather broad category. As long as you work like they say…”

It is the Ally who moves forward first, opening a padded compartment in his pack and reaching out for the Cup. The Soldier feels almost nauseous at the sight of another touching what must be his, but before he can take it himself, or reach out, or even say a word, the man screams and falls to his knees. A flash of darkness ripples over the chamber. Not even the Soldier’s weapon can sense direction—there is nothing but a powerful, vertiginous sense of _wrongness_ , far more potent than the fear that he will fail his mission. He does not know what to do.

Then the darkness and the sickness pass, and the Soldier feels steadier. He attempts to speak.

“Is the artifact intact?” he manages. He repeats it in English when at first there is no answer. German is more comfortable for him, but if English suits his Ally better, then he will make himself use it. He must know the answer. His mission depends on it.

“There’s—“ his Ally gasps, then stops and clutches his chest for several seconds. “I’m fine, I’ll be fine. It’s fine. There’s some kind of defense mechanism, it was like—I couldn’t lift it, I wasn’t enough, I was being torn in _half_ —“

The man stops speaking; the pain is clearly very great. If it is too much, the Soldier may have to leave him behind, which seems like a terrible waste. His Ally had been so kind. He takes the step forward, then, observes the innocuous shining surfaces of the beautiful object. There is no visible mechanism, but the results of the trap are clear and undeniable. Without understanding it, there is no way to circumvent it. The Soldier braces himself and puts his right hand out, ready to lunge.

“No!” his Ally cries. “No, you can’t, you have no idea…”

The man does not seem to have the breath to finish, but he is recovering, getting to his feet—trying to keep the Soldier from completing his mission. It is unacceptable, and moreover incorrect.

The pain cannot be too much; this is what he is meant for.

But the Ally moves more quickly than the Soldier had anticipated. He dives forward with his arm outstretched, attempting to make a shield of himself, not quite succeeding. His sudden speed is not enough to reach the artifact first, and his strength is not enough to stop the Soldier’s momentum. He manages only to interpose his hand before the two of them impact the Cup at once.

 

*

 

This time, there is no flash of darkness. There is no scream, and no sense that the object is deadly or even difficult to lift. There is only the silence of the cavern and their bated breath, the touch of bare hands, the thump of two heartbeats as one slows and the other quickens to a single pounding unison, and then— _everything_.

It’s like a dam breaking open where he’d thought there was only a wall, like being given the Baron’s injections in reverse. It’s the Cup’s doing, and it isn’t. The Soldier’s mind is flooded with a sea of feelings and thoughts and sense-memories that do not belong to him: the smell of hot metal and the metallic taste of blood; the rapid-fire surges of fear, determination, want, curiosity, and a thousand other feelings he has no names for; a vision of a shattered heart boundless and full to the brim. They rush by all at once, too fast to see and just fast enough to know, inundating him, soaking in deeper than he knew his soil went. He’s swimming in a miasma of so many things he can only barely comprehend and everything else just goes away. His weapon’s anger is a distant memory. All he can think of, wildly, is that very first drink of water he received after days in the pit, the way he nearly _breathed_ it in for want—

He’d never really known how dry he was, how empty, until he knew what it was like to be full. Only a single, overwhelming second has passed, but he knows he never wants to let this feeling go. He _wants_ to breathe it in, suffuse himself in it, drown in it.

Turning to see the face of the man beside him is almost redundant, now, but looking at him is an experience all to itself. There is so much more to him underneath, so much more kept invisible, that it suddenly seems ridiculous to call him an ally or a hostile or any label at all; he is himself, and that is enough. That is everything. Without asking, the Soldier knows what to call him.

“You are Tony,” he murmurs, or maybe he only thinks the words, but it doesn’t matter. Loud or silent, Tony hears him all the same. There is a rush of emotion there, too, being heard, having a _voice_ as Hydra so rarely allows him. It is not a feeling he knows how to contain or describe; it is pure vitality.

“You’re…” Tony begins. Cautious, wary. A little of the warmth and the rush between them slow, making it more bearable, and yet it is not better that way. Tony is feeling something complicated and cold and prickly. “You’re ZEMO,” he states.

The words are English, pointed and edged, a concentrated blade of disgust that pierces right through the last of the Soldier’s elation. It’s right, it’s correct, and he knows the names of the Baron’s injections, but somehow he also knows that Tony is _wrong_.

“No,” he protests. “No, I—I am the Winter Soldier.”

But that, too, is wrong, and he doesn’t know what right is. The only other idea he has is something—something—but as much as it seems _almost_ right, it does not belong to him. It has not been given to him, and he cannot give it to himself; he was not designed to. It is a struggle even to use the personal pronoun.

Until this moment, the Soldier had not known to want a name.

“That’s what I thought,” Tony says flatly. “And I’m sorry, really I am, but you’re one of Hydra’s monsters now, and you need to get the hell out of my head.”

Between them the channel narrows sharply, dammed back up with Tony’s sudden distance and his anger and his conviction that there can be no other course of action. The rush of life and energy weakens; the cold orderliness of the Soldier’s mind seeps back in. It would be a relief if it didn’t hurt like losing some vital tool or supply or—or whatever it is that Tony is to him.

“Please,” he says. An English word, a foreign word. He does not think he has ever said it before, but he has pulled it out of desperate people. He feels desperate. To have this, to taste Tony’s mind and _know_ him and then lose that—there is a part of him that is very sure it would kill him. Briefly, there is a weakness in the icy barrier, a stab of compassion as bright as sunlight.

“Just tell me…” Tony says softly. “Tell me you wouldn’t kill me if I stopped being useful to you. Tell me you could stop yourself, even knowing that Hydra wants me dead.”

This is his chance. All he has to give is a word or two, a true answer. All he has to do is the same thing he already did down below in the pit, where he promised not to attack Tony. He doesn’t _want_ to kill him. He doesn’t want to bring harm to that bright, bright mind touching his.

But in the end, _wanting_ isn’t enough. Sparing Tony was done in service of his mission, or at least he had believed it was when he did it, but this desire, here, is pure selfishness.

The Soldier was not designed to be selfish.

If he knows nothing else, he knows that his mission is paramount; Hydra is his life, and his purpose. If Hydra orders him to kill this man, he will hate it, but he will do it. He remembers the flash of memory, the gentler Baron he had killed in service of a new one, and Tony’s recognition and fear hit him all over again. Their connection is almost gone.

“I need you,” he pleads.

“No, you don’t,” Tony sighs. “You’re just having an endorphin response to whatever the Cup is doing to us. I’ve got about half a lab on the airship—let’s just get out of here so we can _un_ do it.”

One last chance to prove he is not ZEMO: they cannot leave until one of them releases the Cup, and Tony clearly knows it. It should be even easier to let go than to speak, the grip of his hand damaged and weakened as it is. It should be, but his duty is stronger. He cannot prove a lie. The Soldier _is_ what Tony believes him to be.

At last the link between them glaciates completely, leaving only shadows and meaningless flashes beneath the cold surface, and it remains that way as Tony lets go, allows him to take the Cup in his own hand. The energy that is Tony’s touch vanishes completely; awareness of the weapon returns with a jolt. Much as the Soldier needs it, much as he knows it is important to Hydra, he has never wanted to feel his weapon less. It takes only a moment to secure the Cup to the straps of his equipment, where it will be kept safe for the journey back to Hydra.

“Yeah,” Tony says, almost sadly, an answer to a question he has not asked the Soldier. He takes one last look at the place where the Cup had rested, running a finger over a few dusty runes there. “Well, that’s one unhelpful _gift_ ,” he murmurs. The whisper of his breath sends a reverberation of the weapon’s anger through the emptiness he has left behind.

Then, aloud: “Do you even remember what it was like, before they turned you into ZEMO?”

The Winter Soldier doesn’t.

 

* * *

 

Tony doesn’t say a word the whole way to the crossroads chamber.

Neither does Winter—the _Winter Soldier,_ he reminds himself, because in light of the last few minutes that nickname seems dumber than ever—but suddenly Tony knows the man well enough to be pretty sure that this scowling muteness is a normal thing for him. He’s some kind of a strong and silent type, reserved unless he has something to say.

Except that _something to say_ probably means _mission report_ , given the limited scope of the man’s life, and damn it, Tony doesn’t want to feel bad for him. Not when there’s nothing he or anyone else can do to help, and _especially_ not when the mystery of Howard’s death has been so brutally solved, or when the weakened rhythm of Tony’s repulsor pump suggests that he might not be far behind, or when his mind keeps falling into the same loop of _he’s going to kill me_ and _Hydra’s going to come back_ and _are we stuck like this forever_ and _I know hurting him doesn’t work—what would happen to me if I killed him first?_

But Tony can’t let himself think about any of that; there are more practical concerns right now. In a choice between the unpleasant and the truly awful, there isn’t much choice at all.

So instead, he tracks the distance they’ve traveled, inventories lab supplies in his mind, and considers the problem before them. There has to be some way to break this strange circuit between them without satisfying whatever the words beneath the Cup were supposed to mean, but Tony’s more of an engineer than a chemist, to say nothing of the brain’s particular delicacy. Maybe he can ask Pepper to set up a consult when he’s back in the States; she seems to know everyone nowadays. Surely there’s at least one _everyone_ in New York who knows a little about creative neurochemistry? The real problem there would be getting his new and deadly companion onto the airship and all the way back home without incident, because all restraint issues aside, Jarvis sure as hell isn’t going to like that plan. Even considering his soft spot for Tony—or perhaps especially so—persuading him to allow this will be a special kind of difficult.

There is no such thing as an easy solution. Tony’s known that since he was twenty-one years old.

He’s so absorbed in trying to find _any_ solution that it takes him a moment to register that they’ve arrived at the crossroads again; he shakes his head and wonders if the Winter Soldier knows him well enough, now, to know that this silence has most assuredly _not_ been characteristic of Tony Stark.

“Here we are,” he says, gathering himself, “inside of what is clearly the _best_ part of Norse mythological influence: the Yggdrasil metaphor that leaves you with eight wrong ways out.” Then Tony lifts the lamp a little higher, reexamines the two different traces of their footprints clearly diverging on the floor, and corrects himself. “Or seven, apparently. Six, counting where we just came from. Do _all_ these tunnels come out somewhere, do you think?”

A flash of confusion comes from the Winter Soldier, like a moment of cognitive dissonance, and then it passes when Tony doubles down on the resistance of the current between them. The circuit won’t break, but he can and _will_ keep it dampened.

“Unknown,” the man replies eventually. “Hydra’s entrance will not be accessible.”

“Well, mine should be,” Tony says, squinting at the dust stirred up by the tremors. He finds the chalk mark he’d left earlier rather smudged on the dark and porous rock, half covered, but thankfully still visible. Hopefully, still safe. As he starts down that tunnel, he adds, “If I had the time and twine, this place would make an interesting map. Unfortunately, the only map I have is tucked away upstairs. In my head. Memorized.”

Tony has only taken a couple of steps when the Winter Soldier’s sudden grip on his shoulder stops him in his tracks. His fist flies instinctively, heart wrenching in his chest, but he pulls the strike at the last second when he sees that it’s the man’s right arm—the broken one. Surely that arm must hurt to move, meagerly bandaged as it is, but the strength of it feels unimpeded.

His _other_ arm is the one Tony shot, and damn it all over again, but he really doesn’t want to feel bad about that, either.

“What?” he snaps, trying to shake his shoulder loose. “I made myself useful, what more do you—“

“I do not want to kill you,” the Winter Soldier states, carefully, as though it is somehow difficult to say—Tony can feel the exertion where their connection remains stubbornly fixed, noise in the system. The man’s expression is intense and serious, but for all that effort it is not so dark as his heretofore scowl. Those familiar blue eyes are almost absurdly clear. Wholehearted. Like he’s never had a single murderous thought in his life, no sir, and he definitely doesn’t have a double-digit kill count.

Maybe before ZEMO, he didn’t.

Or maybe he was some young, hot-blooded German soldier, and he did. There’s no way of knowing, and no way of changing _anything_ even if there was. It won’t do to forget that.

“And I appreciate the sentiment,” Tony bites back, sugary, “but we’ve had this conversation. I’ve seen the inside of your head, sweetheart. Your feelings don’t really get a say. Maybe you can let me live now, but as soon as Hydra says I’m useless—and believe me, they will—you won’t be able to help yourself. You probably won’t even want to anymore.”

The hand on his shoulder releases, stung. So much the better; Tony may be guilty and helpless and angry about it, but he _won’t_ take the truth back.

The memory of the Winter Soldier’s mind, of the first few—awful, euphoric—seconds before boundaries had returned, his haunting: a torment and a hunger, a relieved grasp for another living being, but the _mission_ precedent above all. There is no room in a mind like that for feelings, or needs, or personal wants. There is no room for anything but the burning pressure to obey, and to succeed. In that resolution, Tony’s theory of a super-soldier serum becomes obsolete; Hydra doesn’t need to outdo Erskine’s work to create their very own unstoppable soldier. All it takes is the correct application of zolpidem, ethanol, methylchloride, and ophentonyl, and this man will do anything they require, with no questions asked, and with no concern for his own safety and pain.

If this is what ZEMO is like, what it’s _always_ like…

There are a lot of things Tony has wanted to know about what became of his father as Baron Zemo, but this has never been one of them. _This_ is exactly why he’s been trying to focus on the practical.

“Come on, let’s get going,” he says brusquely. He starts walking without waiting for a response, rightly guessing that the Winter Soldier will not be able to allow Tony to get too far ahead of him. In a matter of seconds, they are side by side in silence once more—or at least, audible silence. There is still a continuous, low-level push against the shoddy mental barrier he’s erected between them, like the hum of a live wire, or like words on the tip of the tongue. Maybe the Winter Soldier has a question; maybe this is just how the current between them runs.

Tony shouldn’t want to study it. He’s going to end it one way or another.

“You know, _you_ could be helping block this out, too,” Tony complains instead. Then, because he’s not above playing a little dirty: “I’m sure _Hydra_ wouldn’t want me fucking with your neat little topiary-garden brain.”

“Hydra would want me to glean as much information as possible from contact with your mind,” the Winter Soldier counters without hesitation. Whole sentences in English seem awkward for him, but smooth and methodical. Logical. Damn it, he’s _smart_. Tony buries a stab of weird admiration deep down under the imminent threat of death, and they leave the crossroads behind.

 

*

 

Eventually, the Winter Soldier does ask a question, though almost definitely not the one he’d thought of earlier. Since then they’ve passed by a number of darkened wrong turns, and they’ve climbed over heaps of stone that have collapsed into the tunnel, and they’ve braced themselves for another tremor—this one, thankfully, hadn’t brought down any more of the structure. The dust is still falling from this latest disturbance when, roughly, the man clears his throat. It sounds painful, and Tony passes the water without even thinking about it; he’s probably too soft for his own good. There’s enough left to get them out, but it isn’t a lot.

“How does the Cup work?” is what the Winter Soldier asks, when his voice has recovered. Tony resists the urge to laugh.

“Well, that’s the question of the hour, isn’t it?” he replies. “Trust me, if I knew that, we’d already have our heads to ourselves again. Or, better yet, we wouldn’t have gotten into this telepathic mess in the first place—though in that case we probably would’ve killed each other by n—“

“I know that,” the man interrupts. _He’s_ the one avoiding what he’s already admitted to be true, and Tony’s the one being realistic. It’s almost amusing. “You were not aware of this effect. You were surprised, when we first joined together.”

Well, that’s less amusing. Does he have to phrase it like that?

“Then what _are_ you asking?” Tony questions. He lifts his lamp a little higher as they turn a corner and step over some debris that looks long-settled; Katla has a rich history of seismic and volcanic activity, and really they’re lucky the obstructions aren’t worse. As they start walking easily again, he goes on, “I mean, I did research and translations, sure, but down here there seems to be a lot of… extraneous weirdness. Stuff nobody wrote about.” Like the fact that contact with the artifact can apparently drain half the charge from his heart. For example.

The Winter Soldier nods and accepts this, but he doesn’t seem satisfied.

“When you touched the Cup, you were surprised,” he repeats. “Either you had anticipated a different response, or you had anticipated no response at all, and it is unlikely that you would attempt retrieval of an object that is of no use.”

“Hey, I’ve gone after plenty of useless artifacts in my day!” Tony protests automatically—though, in retrospect, it hardly seems something to be proud of.

“Your concern with the artifact’s appearance, as well as your desire to keep it from Hydra, suggest that this is not presently the case,” the Winter Soldier says. _Smart,_ Tony reminds himself. Hydra always did like brainwashing the intelligent ones, the skilled ones.

“Alright, sure, I’m not here ‘cause it’s pretty,” he admits. “But do you really not know what Iðunn’s Cup is _for?_ ”

“Mission details state that it is vital to the restoration of Hydra,” the Winter Soldier says simply. It feels like half of a sentence, incomplete; Tony waits, and waits, but no more information seems to be forthcoming.

“That’s it? That’s really it?” he demands, and he knows he sounds a little wild.

“It was not a superfluous question,” the man replies.

Tony is half disbelieving and half sick to his stomach. He tries not to, but suddenly he can’t stop thinking of that broken arm, that caged-animal violence, the starved way the man had sucked water from Tony’s canteen. It’s Hydra, and it’s not a surprise, except for the way it hits him like a punch in the gut—or, more aptly, like a swift, powerful grip over his carotid. He feels almost lightheaded. All that, and the man had never even _known_ what he was here for. It had probably never even occurred to him to ask; they had probably _ordered_ him not to ask.

And Tony hadn’t wanted to feel this way, hadn’t wanted to let himself when there was nothing he could do to _fix_ the problem like he’d known he would want to—but whatever else he feels, he does feel this, too. He has from the beginning.

“You are functional, Tony?” the Winter Soldier asks. He seems to have learned his lesson about putting his hands on Tony without warning, but there is a new furrow between his eyebrows.

Damn it. Tony must’ve let the resistance between them slip. On that, he won’t budge. He bolsters it as best he can, trying not to let anything else leak through.

“ _I’m_ fine,” he says, though he doesn’t really feel it. “But you—“

He stops. This is an unproductive line of reasoning. The Winter Soldier doesn’t remember anything else, not like Howard had seemed to, and ZEMO, as Tony knows too well, is permanent.

But that doesn’t mean that the man can’t form new memories. Some things, some larger-scale applications of the Cup’s supposed abilities, are not exactly safe to tell a man who will be made to report everything if he can get back to Hydra, but that still leaves a lot to tell. Myths, and truths, and the ways that Tony has learned to sort between the two. He starts over.

“Iðunn’s Cup is supposed to have healing properties,” Tony begins. “It takes its name from the goddess Iðunn, a symbol of youth. In the stories, she kept an orchard of golden apples that had incredible restorative abilities. Whenever the gods began to grow old and weak, they would come to her, and she would renew their strength…”

 

*

 

Tony talks and talks, because talking is arguably what he does best, and because it’s infinitely better than the earlier silence. He still doesn’t know what he’s going to do when they get out of here—whether it’s going to be possible to break the circuit, whether he’ll be able to keep the Winter Soldier from returning to Hydra, whether the man won’t just be compelled to kill Tony as soon as he has an easy exit from this labyrinth—but at least the stories give Tony one solid thing to focus on. He’s always liked the myths and tales that come with adventuring, and now, for the first time since Pepper went independent, he has fresh ears to practice them on.

It’s not exactly ideal, but in some strange way, it is nice.

The stories keep them going for several minutes in the darkness, in their own little bubble of lamplight, simply speaking and listening. At least, Tony thinks the Winter Soldier’s attentive quiet signifies listening—he cannot be completely sure until, at length, the man interrupts Tony’s speculative rendition of the death of Iðunn’s brother.

“This story is written down?” the man asks. With his free hand, Tony rubs uncomfortably at the back of his neck.

“Not exactly?” he says. “Sorry, Wi—sorry, this one’s pretty much my best guess at this point. I’ve got, like, two attestations. It’s not really polished like the others.”

“It is satisfactory,” the Winter Soldier says, and Tony almost snorts. He supposes it’s less of an insult when it at least implies that he’s been able to wake up some kind of interest before satisfying it. “But the walls are illustrated. This story is written there?”

Tony looks up, and sure enough, they’re just beginning to come to the place where the murals of old metallic tracery had ended on the way in. Parts of it are unfamiliar, since he’d been in something of a hurry the last time, but up ahead the lamplight clearly glints from a little golden point in the stone of the wall. Metal can oxidize and grow dim, but the amber inlay of the apple of youth will last most any test of time.

“Hah, welcome to attestation number two,” Tony says. He tells the story all over again, pointing out the images as they walk, though the Winter Soldier soon passes him by as he slows down to take a closer look at some of the images he’s already seen. At first even Tony thinks he’s just wasting time, but then…

The two men forced to fight, one of them suffering a terrible wound and the other coming out nearly unscathed, the need of the latter to protect the injured man despite their conflict, the way they find themselves forced to be enemies, yet brought together by Iðunn—Tony can’t help but find it eerie. Surely it’s no more real than reading one’s own life into a fortune cookie, but he can’t seem to look away from that penultimate image before the brother’s death and Bragi’s healing. The wounds, and the two lovers, and the golden apple.

The composition itches at his mind, like there would be something _more_ to see if Tony could just figure out how to look…

“Wait!” he calls, and up ahead the Winter Soldier pauses. “I thought this was just a mural, but I think it’s an instruction manual!”

“It will explain how the Cup works?” the man asks. He comes closer, and his tangled dark hair obscures his face as he leans in to look at the images.

“Most of this probably doesn’t matter at all—the story leading up, I mean, that could probably happen any way at all,” Tony explains, excited. “But they make a point of depicting two characters, even though only one of them is associated with healing, and they’re holding an apple _together_. An amber apple, just like the one I saw on the side of the Cup. If we can assume that the apple is symbolic, then the characters…”

“They hold it exactly as we did,” the Winter Soldier finishes. He’s pushing at the circuit between them, oddly excited. “You suggest that two persons are necessary to the operation of the Cup.”

“Well, it would explain the two platforms that lead up to it, and why it was so easy to pick it up once we’d both touched it,” Tony says, “not to mention the fact that it wouldn’t even budge for me the first time—“ And the fact that touching it had killed about _half_ of Tony’s power, if he’s any judge of the weakened feeling in his chest, though it’s probably best not to let the other man know about that. Stress isn’t good for it either, but the situation isn’t urgent, yet.

When they start walking again, Tony’s mind is going a mile a minute, but he feels less frantic than he did when they first left the artifact chamber. More focused. This is how he always feels when he’s close to figuring out a new artifact—though usually he doesn’t have to ignore the push of a similar feeling on the other end of a telepathic bond, like a weird echo. It’s a sign of some kind of progress that Tony has no idea what the man is thinking so hard _about_ , and he tells himself that he’s not curious.

After several minutes of walking, it becomes clear that the Winter Soldier has something to say. His even gait doesn’t slow down, but his breathing quickens and catches. He sounds… tense, like he’s waiting for something.

“To use these healing abilities,” the Winter Soldier begins, slowly, “it is likely that we two will be required? That the artifact will fail to function without the two who have been connected to it?” _And to each other_ , he does not say, but he’s pushing hard enough at the circuit between them that Tony immediately understands what he means by it. It’s almost painful, the intensity he puts into that push.

He’s not correct—Tony suspects that _any_ two people would do—but the point is not to be right. It’s to be useful. _You want me to trust you_ , Tony thinks. Those few seconds of raw contact must have really impressed themselves on the man’s mind, if even his restricted emotions are still stuck on this one point. He’s looking for any excuse.

Well, Tony can be kind, especially if it’s in his own best interest.

“I think that’s a fair assumption based on the information,” he agrees. “In that case, Hydra probably wouldn’t be very happy if you killed me.”

Tony thinks he sees a hint of a smile on the Winter Soldier’s face, but it could just as easily be a trick of the light, because a second later his expression is something stony and much closer to a grimace. The man’s brow furrows and his jaw tightens like he’s sighted an enemy. Surprised, Tony turns to look—

And there’s nothing there. Nothing at all that he can see, not for several more seconds of walking and staring at the place where their pool of light ends, until suddenly the edge of that pool starts getting closer.

At first it seems like an optical illusion, but soon it becomes undeniable: the passageway is ending, and the other man had somehow seen it coming beyond the range of Tony’s eyes. Piles of dark rock fill the tunnel and flood it, climbing higher as they go further back, reaching the ceiling within a few feet. Some are small, but many are too massive to be shifted by anything but a bulldozer—or an earthquake.

They’ve walked right into a dead end.

 

*

 

For a few mad seconds, Tony thinks they’re going to be able to get out anyway. He drops the lamp and scrambles over the mountain of fallen rock, sending fragments and dust flying everywhere, looking for a gap or a crevice or a stone that isn’t load-bearing. Anywhere he can dig through. It’s like the world’s worst balancing trick, and he has no way of knowing how deep it goes. Yards. Hundreds of yards, maybe. It would take more strength than either of them has, and more time than Katla will give them, to break through to the other side of this tunnel—if the other side even exists anymore.

Eventually, even Tony has to concede defeat; his knowledge of this route is useless, now. Worse, when he climbs down from the pile he can see the Winter Soldier’s gloved fist clenching restlessly, reminding him just how flimsy his guess about the Cup had been. It’s an excuse, nothing more, and some part of the man’s brain probably knows it. He swallows.

But they’re not trapped. They’re not done yet.

“Okay,” Tony says. He breathes. “We’re okay.” He stares back into the tunnel, into the darkness beyond the lamp. It’s not like he’s never been in a tight spot before, and he’s still a genius. He can solve this. “There has to be another way out,” he says quickly. “There has to be. If I can just think—“

“There were nine entrances in total, at the crossroads,” the Winter Soldier supplies, still in careful English, following his train of thought. He’s still trying to help. “One of them may remain open.”

It’s the obvious, but _does_ help. It’s somewhere to start, something concrete to focus on.

“Exactly,” Tony says, as authoritatively as he can. He squats down and sketches the crossroads in the dust; seeing it helps him think, too. Around it he adds the basic shape of Katla, the elevation contour, the places where stone is exposed, the majority of the mountain that remains subglacial. If he can assume that the tunnels basically continue in the direction they take away from the crossroads—and _this_ one does, more or less—then not all of them are reasonable choices. One will lead back to the artifact chamber, and four will lead towards the caldera, miles across and likely to be even more unstable than the fringe of the volcano where they are. He crosses these off with prejudice.

“We will have to choose between the other four?” the Winter Soldier asks, kneeling beside Tony. He holds the lamp steadily over the drawing with his right arm, which has to be hurting him—but it doesn’t matter now. They can get to a proper hospital when they get out of here.

“Not _all_ four of them,” Tony corrects. “This one, here, is where we are right now, and obviously that’s not going to work.” He grabs a pebble from the mound and drops it there, near the bottom of the drawing. “That leaves three, and I’m going to bet you came in through one of those.”

The Winter Soldier looks at Tony with something like puzzlement, but he closes his eyes to focus. There’s a little stab of effort and pain where their minds are connected, but it’s gone a second later. When he opens his eyes again, he points at another entrance, this time at the top of the drawing.

“Alright, good, thanks,” Tony says. “So we know two tunnels that won’t get us out—what, did yours collapse on the way in or something?” He reaches for a second pebble.

“No, it has not collapsed,” the man says. “At least, it had not before.”

“Then how are you so sure that we can’t leave that way? If you came in, then we know it was open when you did, and we know that it’s probably still safe—”

Tony’s skepticism is met with a strange new variation of scowl from the Winter Soldier, one that is part confusion and part irritation and part something else entirely.

“The reason I give is not one you will trust,” he says. He sounds very sure of it, and he explains, “Before the mission began, Hydra relayed parameters and time constraints. The retrieval was to be completed within an allotted day, because the doorway to the passage was to open at the beginning of that period, and at the end, become impossible to enter or exit.”

Well, he’s right that Tony’s not inclined to trust any Hydra intel, but this is a special case. Tony’s research had turned up the exact same limitation, the time-locked door to the tunnel, and now it makes him nearly vibrate in place. He can still remember the exact phrasing of the passage he’d translated; it had been dense and poorly worded, and it had given him endless trouble.

“Tell me,” Tony orders. “Tell me _exactly_ what you were told about the day of your mission.”

The Winter Soldier does. He explains about the descriptions of locking stone doors and the mechanisms of the solar calendar that drives them—and _solstice_ is the word he uses. Tony could kiss him right then and there, he really could.

“Yes!” he cries, leaping to his feet. “They gave you a day, but it’s not a day, it’s a week! It’s tonight!” He doesn’t even wait for an answer, knowing the Winter Soldier must follow him as he nearly runs down the tunnel, back the way they came. “Hydra’s going to need to hire a new translator, my friend, and in the meantime we are getting _out_ of here!”

Behind him, the other man’s steps are catching up and his voice is calling a question, but Tony has too much energy to wait for him right now.

“It should have said _Midsummer!_ ” he yells back, and he doesn’t slow down.

 

*

 

Eventually, Tony does have to walk again, to pace himself so he isn’t tired out too soon in the day, but the restless excitement under his skin doesn’t go away even when the Winter Soldier falls into step with him again. The man’s face is still frowning like he’s forgotten how to make any other expression, but he _is_ pleased, Tony’s sure of it—he’s pushing at the barrier between them again.

It really, really shouldn’t be reassuring that any iteration of ZEMO should try to touch Tony’s mind, especially after what he did to a certain _other_ iteration—and Tony does shore up the resistance on the current just in case—but at the same time, the determination of that searching, seeking…

It’s the most _human_ thing he’s felt about the man.

And, well, maybe Tony _has_ been looking for company, lately. Not too actively, and not from this quarter, certainly, but maybe he’s been a little lonely. With Rhodey transferred and Pepper writing independently and Jarvis not getting any younger, he’s been wanting—

Not this. Obviously. But something.

He’s aware that the Winter Soldier doesn’t truly want to be connected with _him_ , either; his weakened, restrained emotions had surged when he had been given any contact at all. A little unkindly, Tony thinks that it was probably not too different from that first drink after months of staying dry. It doesn’t matter _what_ it is, just that it sates the thirst. Hydra would probably keep him thirsty on purpose—and, as Tony counts up from the solstice to the last day of Midsummer, spending _four days_ trapped down here can hardly help—so the man would likely take anything. Anyone. He’d barely even known who Tony was, when the circuit first formed.

After a few minutes, the itching pressure in the back of Tony’s head abates; the Winter Soldier seems to realize that Tony’s good mood is not suddenly going to make him change his opinion on sharing his mind with Hydra’s pawns. A little of the good mood abates, too, but that doesn’t matter. They’re in a _volcano_ , and a restless volcano at that.

 

*

 

It feels like they get back to the crossroads much faster than they left it, and luckily it looks just the same as it had before. Two entrances chalked, four tracks of prints across the floor, nine tunnels disappearing into the darkness.

One tunnel, hopefully, that has more than darkness at the end of it. Tony counts them out carefully and starts forward, holding his lamp high to try to see what’s ahead. Even several yards down the tunnel, it looks open and regular enough to be encouraging. He doesn’t hesitate. If his sense of time is correct, there are still many hours left of Midsummer’s last day, but there’s no point in wasting even a moment of that time.

Then the Winter Soldier stops on the threshold, and the spread of his bare right hand keeps Tony from going in, either.

“What are you doing?” Tony asks, his tone cautious. “This is the right way to go, isn’t it?”

“It is Hydra’s route,” the man replies stiffly.

“Then what’s the problem?”

But even as he says it, Tony knows the problem: if they go this way, then Tony isn’t the one with the map anymore. They’ve already narrowed down the workable tunnels, and supplies are easily stolen. His left hand drops to his belt, and he _knows_ it’s not surreptitious and probably not smart either, but if he’s about to outlive his usefulness—

“Hydra’s route was… not easy,” the Winter Soldier says. Tony blinks. It’s so far from what he expected that he feels his fingers loosening on the gun automatically.

“Not easy?” Tony repeats.

“There are many barriers to cross if we take this route, and there are some that will be especially dangerous for you,” the other man explains. His face is strained and conflicted, and yet his apprehension takes the fight out of Tony. It’s a _warning_ , not a threat. The Winter Soldier is being protective; that flimsy excuse is holding somehow. It’s enough to rein him in, for now.

“Well, I appreciate that, but—“

It’s enough, but the Winter Soldier isn’t done yet. Again there is a surge of effort and pain, and this time it is audible in his voice. He says, “I do not want you to be harmed.”

It’s… touching, in a strange way. He’s trying. Whatever he’s really capable of in the end, he _is_ trying.

It would be more touching if there were any other way out of here, though.

“Look, we can—” Tony says, and then he starts over again in German, talking quickly. He can try, too. “We can take a random guess and hope like hell that it’s a real exit and that it hasn’t been caved in, _or_ we can take the tunnel that we already know leads outside, that has a reasonable chance of remaining intact, and that one of us has already been through. Unless you’re seeing some mysterious third option here… we’re going in, and we’re going now. I, personally, want to be far away from here if Katla’s kettle decides to boil.”

“I—“ the Winter Soldier begins. He seems lost for words, and for once it doesn’t have anything to do with his language abilities. He drops his arm.

“So it’s settled, then.” Tony enters the tunnel with more curiosity than fear, wondering what could possibly be more dangerous for _him_ than for a man with both arms compromised. The first several yards, at least, don’t seem any different from the other path, but he knows better than to judge the beast before he’s seen the teeth. Behind him the Winter Soldier follows, almost agreeable, but for the way he sticks close and steps more lightly than ever.

 

*

 

For several minutes they walk at a brisk pace; smooth and even passageway or no, neither of them wants to stay here any longer than they have to. A few wrong turns stretch away into the darkness, but the Winter Soldier passes them by without even looking at them, like he’s done this a hundred times before. He must have a very good memory—except, of course, for the whole other life that’s been wiped from his mind.

Remembering that old life wouldn’t help the man, or at least it hadn’t done a damned thing for Howard Stark, but Tony can’t help his curiosity. Before today, he’d thought the man was just some enemy agent like any other, if perhaps a little cleverer than the rest. Now, he knows there’s a story there.

Tony can never resist a good story.

Before ZEMO, the Winter Soldier would’ve been a quick, talented young man, and plenty handsome, if he’d taken proper care of himself—the kind who attracted friends easily and caught more than his fair share of interested eyes. There might still be a girl missing him somewhere, or a boy, or a family. A group of friends. A unit who lost him, if he really had been a soldier.

It’s weird, thinking of that cold, alien mind as _human_ , but he would’ve been, back then. He would’ve had feelings and fears and wants, unrestricted and unprogrammed. He might’ve been as protective and dedicated to the people he’d known as he now is to his mission.

Or he might not have been. Tony’s drifted into speculation, and he knows too well that it only takes a few injections to turn a man’s personality inside out. No point in a Soldier who doesn’t want to follow orders. All Tony knows for certain is that the man would’ve been just a little too intelligent for his own good—intelligent to catch a different sort of eye, whether he’d wanted to or not.

The Soldier had done a lot of things, whether he’d wanted to or not. He’d killed even the one man who should have had every reason to trust that intricately pruned mind.

Tony curiosity sours. He already knows how this story ends.

 

*

 

So he focuses, again, on the practical. Tony counts his steps, keeps track of every turn, does his best to estimate the falling percentage of the repulsor pump’s charge. Without a map or charging equipment, none of it is very _useful_ , but it does help drown out the silence of the tunnel and the loudness pushing at the back of his head. He keeps at it.

 _Twenty-three steps, turn thirty degrees to the south. Approximately fifty percent of charge lost on contact with the artifact. Sixty-one steps, then ten degrees back to the north. Additional drain of charge under sudden stresses, ten percent, or fifteen, or even twenty—_ to his frustration, he’s never been able to pin down a precise rate of loss for a given stressor. _Twenty-eight steps, false turn on the north side. Forty-nine more steps forward, increased presence of debris_.

He’s distracted from his own distraction, briefly, as he adjusts his grip on the lamp to climb over a slide of rock. Part of the tunnel wall must have collapsed, but it looks less rocky on the other side, and he jumps the last few feet.

Then Tony hits the wall _hard_ , a heavy weight pressed against his back.

“Hey, what the hell—“ he shouts, his heart straining. He should have known not to turn his back on the Winter Soldier. He should have known—

Not a moment later the earth groans and dozens of cracks spiderweb through the porous rock as the Winter Soldier presses them still closer into the wall. A bruising hail shakes loose from the ceiling and crashes down for an endless _beat, beat, beat_ of the other man’s heart against Tony’s back, but the heavy worst of it hardly touches them, and then it ends.

The silence, afterwards, is deafening.

Tony’s heart is racing and aching and he can’t quite breathe, and he’s sure he lost still more crucial power in the shock of it, but he’s okay. They’re okay. He stumbles away from the wall when the Winter Soldier allows it, and he sees that they’d been standing under the most perfect arch for twenty feet in either direction. A strong point, a place of safety.

“What the—“ he gasps when he has air again. “H—how the hell did you know that was going to happen?”

“I—“ the Winter Soldier begins. “I—I—“

It’s not a stutter. Even as Tony is recovering his air, the other man seems to be losing his; every time his mouth opens to shape words, his chest seems to catch and his voice stops dead. They’re speaking German now, and he must know the words; whatever the answer is, he’s not _allowed_ to say it. Hydra won’t let him.

And yet Hydra had let him save Tony—rather, the Hydra part of his brain had been persuaded that he was _allowed_ to save Tony. _Hydra wouldn’t be too happy if you killed me_ , Tony remembers saying. That excuse might be pretty strong, after all.

But the Winter Soldier is still trying to speak.

“I have a—a gift,” he gasps. It sounds like it hurts, but he doesn’t stop. “An artifact. F—from a mission. It—it—it helps. It knows.“ That’s as much as he can manage before he runs out of air completely, but now Tony isn’t breathing either. He’s just staring. There’s a lot to consider—what artifact? Where did he get it? How? _When_?—but more novel than any of that… Tony doesn’t think anyone’s ever _fought_ ZEMO before. Not like this.

Maybe it isn’t the excuse that’s strong. Maybe the story isn’t over.

And Tony doesn’t know why it’s happening, doesn’t know what it means—he’d have to do hundreds more hours of research to find anything more conclusive than _the Cup did it somehow_ , which isn’t much better than _magic_ —but he does know that this man, whatever his name used to be, just saved him.

“Thanks,” Tony says. He swallows, tests the hum of the _V_ on his lip. “Thank you, Winter.”

 

* * *

 

Fear.

It’s the first, most tangible reaction. It’s the one that makes the most sense. The paralytic that floods the Winter Soldier’s veins, the anxious sedative to his will to keep going, is nothing less than purely rational. From the day he first acquired his weapon, he has known that it was to be a secret, kept at the discretion of his superiors, and that he was never, under any circumstances, to reveal its nature to an outsider. His mouth tastes bitter and rough, and he swallows. It’s hard to meet Tony’s eyes.

The Soldier knows his orders, and he has disobeyed them.

He doesn’t know why he did it. He doesn’t know _how_ he did it. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen to him, or to his weapon, or to Tony, as a result. All he knows is that he disobeyed, and there has to be a consequence.

_Breaking, cutting, tearing as what belongs to him is stolen away, a burning that takes even his air to scream—_

And yet…

“I—are you okay?” Tony asks, and they both know he’s not talking about the earthquake. “I mean, you’re stuck here with me, of course you’re not okay, but _is_ it me? Did I just make it worse? I know it was kind of dumb, should I not…?”

And yet there is more than fear in the Soldier’s veins.

When he disobeyed, Tony had thanked him, had been _kind_. Tony had called him _Winter_ , full stop, with his easy, almost-perfect German vowels and the New York flavor of his _R_ and the careful way that they both knew it was the first time Tony had called him anything but _you_. It had been the Soldier’s title, broken and halved the other way, and yet somehow it had sounded like an appellation, not a designation.

It had sounded good _._ It had almost sounded _right_. It makes him impulsive.

“You should,” he says before he can stop himself. They are both surprised, and for a moment it hangs in the air like it might vanish. It doesn’t.

“Alright then, Winter,” Tony replies carefully. The Soldier’s mind catches, clutches, holds. Inside, in the cold and silent stillness, some part of him wakes up and breathes.

There has to be a consequence.

Winter takes a first breath, and then another, and another. It is not easy. There is a sudden, powerful urge to _undo_ , to tear the voice from Tony’s throat until the sounds are unsaid, the words unmeant, the world unchanged; at his side, his weapon is no more pleased that he has preserved the strange energy that is Tony’s life. Winter breathes and breathes again, and somehow he keeps them both steady and still. He has to protect Tony—and the weapon, and the artifact, and himself, if he can. For Hydra, he reminds himself. Everything the Winter Soldier does is for Hydra, and Hydra will be pleased.

The thought isn’t as settling as it always used to be. He breathes once more. It will have to be enough. There is more than fear in him, and he is afraid of more than one thing.

Whatever is happening to Winter, whatever else is true, he knows that he must keep Tony safe. They can’t stay here. This arch of the tunnel is secure, but there are no solutions here under the volcano, no answers. Safety, paradoxically, is found only in the dangers ahead.

“Come on,” Winter says, and Tony follows.

 

*

 

As they walk, Tony talks.

No, that’s incorrect. Tony asks questions. Long and short, simple and complicated, and all of them utterly unexpected.

Tony wants to know what kind of food Winter prefers, how he likes to spend his downtime, how he takes care of his leathers. He wonders whether Winter remembers how the pearly fog had looked around the feet of the Carpathians, that bitter spring morning when they’d nearly met. Tony’s too smart to try digging out information about Hydra—too smart to think Winter won’t notice—but it doesn’t seem to slow him down at all. One after another after another he asks his questions.

And Winter answers.

Winter has no preferences, or he never has before. He eats what he is given. He lets Hydra’s technicians handle his gear. He does nothing during the between-times, though he catches himself before he tells Tony why. And he doesn’t really remember the Carpathians at all. Mostly, he remembers the anger that he had lost track of an enemy of Hydra that day.

Now, it seems strange to call Tony an enemy.

It seems stranger to call himself Hydra.

In some ways, Winter thinks he understands his weapon better now than he ever has. Hydra always meant purpose and stability to the Soldier, but is little more than guidance to the weapon; it always likes the work that Hydra gives it. Here under the volcano, nothing is stable. All Winter has, really, is the determination of his mission to get out of this place.

The change should be unsettling, but Winter can hardly dwell on it now. His mind is occupied with learning something else, something new.

After every question, no matter how big or small, there is a pause. Twenty seconds, thirty, sometimes more when they have to climb over debris or duck a low ceiling or when Winter has to invite his weapon’s painful intensity to find their bearings. However long it takes, Tony doesn’t speak again until Winter has given him some kind of an answer. Any answer. Winter has always been punished for saying _I don’t know_ or _I don’t remember_ , but now Tony just nods, integrates it, and moves on to his next point of curiosity.

And the way it _feels…_

There is a rhythm to question and answer, something totally unlike the steady beat of a mission report. It’s soothing, in a way. Winter has become very familiar with the sound of that voice, grown accustomed to the idiosyncratic rise and fall of that halfway American intonation. He _knows_ Tony’s voice, and now he knows how their two pitches fit together. It’s more than questions, and there’s more than an answer rising in the back of Winter’s throat.

It’s more than questions, because Tony isn’t just asking—he’s _listening_.

Winter’s only ever felt like this once before. A few glorious, fleeting seconds, hours or a lifetime ago, before Tony had built the dam between them. The feeling he wasn’t built to feel, the one he’s been aching to get back ever since it slipped away, the one he doubts he’ll ever really experience again.

It feels like being heard.

 

*

 

“So I was never able to confirm them, obviously,” Tony is saying now, “but I started getting reports that sounded like you around ’44—no, wait, it was ’43, right after the first time I teamed up with Cap. Artifacts stolen, untraceable kills, all over the Pacific Theater. What do you think, Winter, am I close?”

A spasm goes through Winter, the world inverted like a bad frame of film, and then it’s gone again. He shakes his head. It’s a clever estimate, but those early days have always been a muddle of sensations and half-forgotten emotions, and he’s never tried too hard to call them back. They aren’t meant for him.

But the rhythm is still waiting on his answer.

“I don’t know,” Winter says aloud. “I don’t remember that time.”

“Right, ZEMO,” Tony sighs. His face is pensive, and this time the pause is on his end, several yards of tunnel slipping away as he seems to search for a better question. It’s like anticipating the next beat of a song or the next step of a dance, though Winter doesn’t know when he learned either of those things.

“What do you remember, then? Just the recent missions?”

_The richness of bruises in greens and blues and blacks and the live red blood tinted silver, silver—_

Winter takes a breath. It is not his memory, though he remembers it too clearly. He pushes it away. This time, he finds he doesn’t want to say what he has said so many times, but he has no other answer.

“I don’t know,” he repeats, chagrined. Tony doesn’t seem disappointed, but he keeps trying anyway. “There are missions, and times between. I… I know what I need to know.”

“Yeah?” is all Tony asks. Winter wants to agree with him, but he cannot.

The tunnel turns, and turns again, and the only measure is the progress of their steps on the stone floor. They’re almost there.

“Do you remember—“ Tony tries again. “That artifact you mentioned, the one that told you about the earthquake. Where did that come from?”

In retrospect, Winter should have expected this question to come. One secret always begs another. This time, he does know the answer—even with the injections, that day is too stubborn to forget—but he has said enough already. The weapon seizes painfully at his side, an unnecessary warning. In his head, Winter begins, _Arrived seventeenth June at the indicated location, on schedule..._

“A mission,” he says finally. Tony groans. Blocked connection or no, he knows Winter isn’t telling the whole truth.

“Okay, I know this can’t be easy for you,” Tony says, almost gently, “but—“

“Stop.”

“I know you remember _something_ , Winter, and I think—“

“ _Stop_.” English, this time, and Winter suspects the surprise alone would be enough to halt Tony in place.

“Winter?” Tony says. Still in German. He’s kinder than he believes he is, Winter thinks. Careful not to take a step forward, Winter stretches out his right arm, splinted but safe, and he reaches across Tony to gesture into the darkness ahead of them. He knows Tony cannot see it yet; _he_ cannot see it yet. Nonetheless, the quality of the dark, the movement of the air, the restlessness of the weapon at his side… he does not need to see it to know it is there. Light is unnecessary.

“Get out the rope,” Winter orders.

 

*

 

This chasm begins just as suddenly as the one in the artifact chamber, drops away into darkness just as quickly, and poses nearly as much of a threat. The grade of it is closer to eighty degrees than ninety, but it is deeper. Much deeper. Some ancient earthquake had split the inside of the mountain like the estranged shores of a ravine; at the bottom, a smooth and frozen stream of stone attests to the past.

If he falls here, Winter will not be able to climb out. Not again. He suppresses his body’s automatic response.

“Is it ready?” he asks Tony. There is a grunt and a slither of woven rope behind him, a ringing of metal on the outcropping of rock. It isn’t an easy place to secure a rope alone, but Winter can’t yet bring himself to take his eyes off of the blackness.

“Nearly,” Tony says. He makes a satisfied sound as the metal scrapes one last time. “I got the cam in place, I just have to double it so we can go down parallel—“

“Don’t,” Winter says.

“What? Why?”

“Your rope won’t reach the bottom, that way.” It has been days, but Hydra had designed him to have a good eye and a better memory. He saw the length of rope Tony had wound into his pack. He remembers how long it had taken him to make his way up this wall.

“You’re sure about that?” Tony asks, without pausing whatever it is he’s doing. “Really, completely sure?”

“Yes.”

There is a long sigh like a concession. Another slide of webbing, a slap of weight onto the stone floor.

“There, I’m done.”

Winter finally turns around and surveys Tony’s handiwork. The rope is coiled in long loops on the ground, one end prepared to tie them in, the other fastened with sturdy knots and a slender pull cord and anchored to a little metal device that Tony has fitted into the crack between the outcropping and the tunnel wall. It’s a camming device, designed to wedge itself more deeply into the rock the harder they pull, but it’s smaller and more delicately shaped than any Winter has seen before.

“This will hold us?” he says skeptically.

“This could hold _six_ of us,” Tony replies. The note of pride in his voice suggests that he has had a hand in the design, which isn’t surprising at all. It had been easier than anything, seeing that Tony loves to work with his hands, loves to use every ounce of his cleverness. It had been the first thing Winter saw when they were brought together for that one bright heartbeat.

It’s harder, not being allowed to see it anymore, but Tony’s feelings have been made more than clear. Winter is not going to ask.

“Let’s go,” he says instead. He lifts the rope between them, knowing that if they go down together neither one of them can be endangered by the other—or by the weapon. “I can tie us in as you did before. You still have the strength to lock off the figure-eight if we fall—“

“Don’t,” Tony says. An echo of the argument they’ve just finished.

“But we have to—“

“Look, thirty feet up was one thing, but going _down_ here? With no second line or harness? That’s too dangerous, even for _my_ taste,” Tony explains, a touch of warm self-deprecation. It’s a simple, almost gentle contradiction, but Winter shudders all the same, braces himself. He knows what Tony’s going to say next. “We have to go down one at a time.”

It is no surprise to him, but Winter isn’t the only one listening. With the pull cord in place, Tony could well yank the rope down after himself and be on his way, and the weapon would rather see him dead than let that happen.

The weapon would rather see him dead anyway.

But this time, Winter is ready for the attack. His mind is prepared and the muscles of his left side are loose and relaxed, not a drum skin for his weapon’s ready anger to beat upon. He breathes, and he doesn’t let himself make a sound, and the pain recedes into the background of his mind where it belongs. There is only one right answer to this question.

“You go first,” he says. Tony catches his eye and holds it; he understands. The sentence is too short for all the things it means.

It means _I want to keep you safe_.

It means _I am still trying._

It means _I trust you_.

And it is enough. There has to be a consequence, but Winter isn’t sure that it matters anymore.

 

*

 

As Tony rappels, Winter and his weapon both keep a steady awareness on the quiet, momentous shifts of the earth beneath them. It sounds like the sea, they have learned. Deep and lively currents rush underneath, and the waves at the surface are so calm, almost imperceptible, right up until the moment they become too violent to ignore. This present calm, Winter does not trust.

But against the volcano there is nothing either he or his weapon can do, and so he spends most of his energy watching Tony’s descent. Meter by meter, he keeps a count of the distance between Tony and himself, the distance between Tony and the floor of the ravine below. The cam is strong, but losing the anchor point is not the only thing that could go wrong. A slide of rock, a missed step, a bad twist in the rope; Winter is aware of it all.

The weapon, he knows, is only hoping that Tony will fall.

Tony is approximately fifteen meters down from the edge when his progress starts to slow. The change is easy enough to note; Winter is still attuned to the easy and echoing patterns of his movement, back and forth, inhale and exhale. His footsteps and his breathing.

By twenty meters, the change is clear: the one is slower now, and the other faster. It is enough to make Winter concerned. He counts the rhythm and he counts the seconds and he estimates the distance when his weapon refuses.

Winter knows he should not blame it—this useless monitoring, of all things, is most definitely not its purpose—and yet some part of him does. Some part of him is angry, and he hates that part almost more than he is confused by it. He was never meant to be selfish. He was not built to be. The Winter Soldier could be better than that, and Winter, somehow, cannot.

He cannot help being irritated that he can only think _around thirty meters_ when he finds the pattern smoothing out. It is much harder to hear now, but it sounds more even, if not quite the same as it had been at the start. It is a little slower, perhaps more cautious. Well, Tony has never rappelled here before. He certainly cannot be used to these conditions. It is a long way down, if not as long as it had been to climb.

At thirty-four meters precisely, there is a stirring of fear in the weapon.

“Stop!” Winter cries, almost before he is sure of what his weapon senses. He realizes even as he says it that Tony will not be able to hear him clearly; the echo will carry his sound, but not his meaning. A moment of panic, and then his training kicks in sharply: four quick tugs on the rope, another quick one and then a slower, quick and slow and two more quick, one last long and hard. H-A-L-T. Winter thinks Tony will understand. He hopes Tony understands.

Far below, almost out of sight, the pale lines of Tony’s forearms are moving in his wavering light, one up to the rope, the other crossing and then down past his hip, a broken diagonal. Locking off the rope. Winter breathes again.

A second later, the earthquake hits. He and his weapon are united once more for a split second, synchronized by the primal vibration of this force of nature, this fear—and then they diverge. Winter curls beside the outcropping and watches the dust fall and he relaxes; the weapon cannot, and it shakes, too.

This one is a stronger tremor than the last, but a briefer. A cracking sound echoes the way they have come, and then another ripple of vibration, and then it is over.

Winter leans over the side of the ravine. The dust is now too thick to see whether the strength of Tony’s arms had held. There is a moment of panic, and then—

The cam jingles where the metal body is attached to the cable loop, and twice more in succession. Then one quick, one slow, and the sound carries on, taking on more meaning with every ring of metal. Continuing the rhythm. Thanking Winter, again, for what he had never been meant to do.

He still doesn’t understand, and he doubts he truly can. All he knows is that he doesn’t want this to stop.

But Winter had never been meant to hope, either.

 

*

 

After several minutes of silence, the dust has settled, and the echoes of the earthquake have faded from the air; the mountain has returned to its deceptive quiet. Though the liquid rock under the surface of the earth is still restless, there has been no eruption—or at least, not anywhere nearby. Maybe the volcano will not truly erupt at all, or maybe it will do so far away from here.

Or maybe it’s only a matter of time.

Winter leans over the edge of the ravine carefully. Starved for light, his eyes catch even the smallest glimmers of the lamp, but they are faint and illusory, like a hallucination. He closes his eyes.

His hearing is even better than his sight, sharpened by his training, and unimpaired by the darkness. With his eyes closed his own breath is a thunderstorm, and he holds it. Underneath, there are long echoes of air moving in the caverns and the tunnels, the rising currents of temperature changes and the coolness of water drops far too close, a quiet scratch of dust where the rope shifts against the face of the cliff. Then, a new sound: a slither and slackening of pressure. A slap of webbing on stone, momentous and echoing in the stillness.

The tension on the rope has been released. Tony has reached the bottom of the ravine.

Satisfied, Winter opens his eyes to the darkness again and reaches for the rope. It is loose and still where it lies; hauling it up is a matter of a few minutes, slowed only by the weakness of Winter’s broken right arm. The figure-eight is tied onto the end like an offering. Tony doesn’t have another one.

What that means, Winter will not allow himself to speculate. Instead he attaches one of the metal loops to himself, using his equipment straps again for lack of a better harness, and he twists the rope through the other loop. Then he’s ready, and he leans once more over the side of the cliff. The air is different there, though the shadow isn’t. The way to complete his mission is there.

He hasn’t thought of his mission in hours, and that scares him more than the fall.

Frantically, he checks that the artifact is still in place, still well secured beside the figure-eight, and he breathes again to find it uninjured by his rough treatment. There is more than one trial left to put it through, but it is with him, and it is intact, and he is more than halfway back out of the volcano—by sheer distance, anyway. He hasn’t thought of his mission in hours, but he is still on track.

Hydra will be pleased, he thinks, and the familiar thought makes him shudder. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t _want_ to know why.

Winter throws himself over the edge of the ravine and he relishes the endless second of free-fall, relishes the instinctive surge of his heart and the tension of his limbs and even the pain. It burns through him and steals away all of the unease and confusion that have been growing there, until all he has left is the knowledge that he is alive. This, he knows, is _real_. The rope catches and holds.

Rappelling into the ravine is not difficult. Tony’s equipment is in excellent condition, and though Winter is not, he is still functional. The strong grip of his weapon keeps them from falling, and the strength of Winter’s legs keeps them from being dashed against the cliff face.

Push away from the wall, release the rope slowly, slide down a gentle arc to meet the wall again. A new, one-sided rhythm.

A third of the way down, Winter learns why Tony had begun to slow down. The repetitive motion of rappelling has awakened his muscles and warmed them more thoroughly than the walking had, but there is a warmth growing in the air that has nothing to do with exercise. It is subtle, at first, almost too subtle to notice, but soon it becomes unmistakable.

Underground, temperature is a constant. Neither warm nor cold, irrespective of the climate or the seasons. Nothing ordinary would cause a change like this.

Even as he thinks it, Winter slows just as Tony had, nearly stops. Maybe the eruption has already occurred, he thinks wildly. Maybe the waves under the surface have already overrun their bounds, and the liquid heat of the volcano has come to seal off what rock alone could not obstruct. The weapon’s grip is steady, unaffected by the temperature, but his heartbeat is not.

A frozen moment of terror, and then Winter’s training takes him over like a vice grip on the back of his neck, on his shaking hand. His automatic response is irrelevant; he has to _think_. He was built to be logical and persistent always. This fear is neither. He can ignore it.

The ravine is still dark, but for the glimmer of the lamp far below. The air is warm, but it does not rise in hot drafts.

Tony has already gone further down than this, and he too must go. He must complete his mission, he reminds himself. He must please Hydra.

Maybe the earth here is thinner still, or maybe there is a current of heated air coming in from another chamber lower down. Whatever the reason, Winter can see, now, that the conclusion he had jumped to holds no merit. He calms himself and continues to descend—though still, like Tony, more cautiously than he had gone before. Slowly, his heart returns nearly to a normal rate.

He wonders if Tony would have had that same training. It seems unlikely.

 

*

 

The heat continues to increase as Winter descends, never quite becoming unbearable. He can still complete his mission. It is hot, to be certain, when he finally steps away from the cliff face and disentangles himself from the rope, but true danger would be hotter still. True danger would be the red glare hidden beneath the bedrock..

“Tony?” he calls. Tony can’t have gone far from the end of the rope; the light is partially obscured by debris, but much brighter here.

There is no response.

Again Winter’s heart starts beating faster than it should, and even as he calls out again he is rushing over to the place where the lamp lies on the ground. It is resting on a swell of the frozen stone floor, precarious, as though it had fallen there and only just come to rest. A long crack has formed in the side of the glass. That’s all Winter can see at first, the superficial damage that has not yet opened up the electric globe of the lamp, threatening the overwhelming darkness that would not affect his progress, would not—should not—affect _him_.

Then he looks beyond it, and he sees Tony. All thought of his mission vanishes like smoke.

Tony isn’t moving.

Winter reaches out instantly, instinctively, but not with his hand. Where there had once been a focused and fortified dam between their minds, there is now… nothing. No block, but no feelings, either. No awareness at all.

It doesn’t make any sense. The heat isn’t dangerous, and the air is clean, and he couldn’t have fallen. The figure-eight had been tied on carefully, deliberately. There is nothing Winter’s training can do about a situation like this. There is no reason why Tony should be lying motionless on the ground, and yet there he is, prone and still like a sleeping man—or like a dead man. Winter is very familiar with cognitive dissonance. The thought is too impossible for him to be afraid of it.

Winter walks over to Tony’s body with a cool, dissociative kind of curiosity in his steps. He is void of expectation, yet even if he wanted to, he doesn’t think he could stop himself from kneeling there beside Tony, from reaching out his safe hand to rest on that still-warm brow, from staring into that face he remembers better than his own. Even like this, there is an expression there, a pinch of worry or stress between the eyebrows, a tightness about the mouth. If he is sleeping, it is an uncomfortable sleep.

It doesn’t make any sense.

The action is far from safe, but Winter reaches out once more, differently. He is painfully aware of the fragility of a human body; he only allows his weapon the lightest of touches, in the most innocuous of places. Tony would be able to do without the arm, if the weapon were to turn. It rests there, on the skin just below his sleeve, and it opens up every sense that it has.

Tony is alive, the weapon detects. His heart still beats and his lungs still breathe—quickly, shallowly, unsteadily. That strange energy that has always been under Tony’s skin is still there, too, but it is weaker than it was. It fluctuates rapidly, like the flickers of a guttering candle. A surge of pleasure bolts through Winter, so sharp it hurts, as the weapon crows with triumph. It wants this. It has always wanted this, from the moment they first met the man in the darkness.

Tony is alive, but he is dying.

Suddenly, in the glare of the weapon’s victory, it all becomes real, and present, and possible. Winter’s heart stumbles in his chest. This is not fear, or if it is, it is no fear he has ever experienced before. There has been nothing for him to lose before. He feels like a different person.

“ _No_ , Tony, don’t you dare,” he hisses under his breath. “You ain’t gonna die on me. Not now.”

Winter doesn’t know or care what language he’s speaking. Tony’s heart is beating, and he is breathing. Something else must be wrong. He pulls the weapon back to his side and runs his safe hand over Tony, searching for an injury, searching for anything that might cause a healthy, whole man to collapse—searching until his fingers run into something solid and inhuman underneath Tony’s shirts. Winter strips them off without a second thought.

What he sees there on Tony’s chest makes him more confused, not less. On the left side of him, just over where his heart should be, there is a metal panel. It could be merely resting on top of his skin, except for the way the flesh ripples and seals around it, thick and painful scarring.

Winter has seen scarring like that before. He has seen it often.

Along one edge of the metal, there is a rounded place, a careful interlocking of one metal piece with another: a hinge. It is subtle and delicate enough that it, too, can only be Tony’s own work. The prospect of opening that hinge is more dire than all the darkness beyond the lamp, and it is more vast even than the waters ahead. He opens it.

The metal doesn’t look inhuman, anymore.

When Winter reaches careful, horrified, curious fingers toward this most human part of Tony, he feels again that strange vital energy that has always been under Tony’s skin. Finally, he understands why he feels it. There is some kind of power here, necessary to Tony’s life, and it is running out.

A flash of light, a glint on the curved metal, and Winter is reminded of the images on the walls far above. The story Tony had told. It had been a confused and helpless story, and it had ended with a mortal wound; if there is any way to describe the fragile construct of glass and metal in Tony’s chest, that is it. A mortal wound, forever in suspense. There can be only one reason why Tony searched for this place and this object. For the first time, Winter removes the artifact from its safe place strapped to his uniform. He looks hard at it, though he dare not look long. It seems too innocuous for what Tony believes it can do.

But Tony believes it, and that is enough to try. Winter seizes the discarded pack, rummages for water, pours it into the wide, silver-gilt opening of the Cup. It is the last of the water. If it saves Tony, it does not matter.

When the Cup is full, the amber apple seems to melt away and the water inside flares gold, a warm glow beside the lamplight. Winter brings it to Tony’s lips, tilts it gently—

But the water does not pour.

Winter tries again and again, tips the Cup completely upside down, sticks his fingers in and swirls the water, and yet not a single drop will pour forth from the mouth of the horn. It is as though some barrier keeps it there. The Cup will not save Tony.

Winter will have to find another way.

 

*

 

For a minute, all Winter can feel is anger. It is unfamiliar to him, more the province of his weapon than the design of his own mind, and yet now it overwhelms him. Tony is dying, and Tony’s own plan to save himself has failed. Surely Tony would have prepared himself with enough power for this mission, even if he meant it to be the last? There must be others who care about him—surely he would know to keep himself safe, at least for them?

“You _idiot_ ,” Winter hisses. But he can hear a stutter of breath, a slowing; this doesn’t matter now. “You’ll get what’s comin’ if— _when_ ya wake up.”

The important thing now is to help him. He’s running out of power; Winter will find him more. His eyes dart back and forth in the gloom, searching for anything at all in the bare rock and darkness. There is one answer—not the darkness, but the light.

Winter scrambles over to the fallen lamp and turns it over in his hands, careful of the place where the glass is cracked, unwilling to break it before it becomes necessary. He can feel that the electric charge is stored in the handle, and it takes only a second to prize it open. Inside, he finds a battery cell unlike any he’s ever seen: sleek, alkaline, and somehow no weaker after hours in the dark. On the surface, at least, it looks perfect.

With almost as much care as he had taken with Tony’s body, Winter brings the weapon up to touch the two poles of the battery. There is current there, and steady, but it feels… it feels _wrong_ , somehow. Different to what he had felt under Tony’s skin. Winter doesn’t know nearly enough about this to understand why, but he does know, somehow, that this electricity will not do Tony any good. In frustration, he slams the compartment closed again with his uncovered hand, heedless of the grind of his broken bones and the stinging bite of energy to his exposed flesh—

_Vast and impossible stories, other worlds powered by electricity from the heat of the earth, from the stars in the sky, from people themselves—_

The stories—books, he thinks—are even further away than the flashes of memory of other missions and other Barons, long since lost to him, but the little that comes back to Winter now fills him with a different kind of energy. The battery had contained the wrong form of electricity, somehow, but it is not the only form there is. It is not the only form available, even here.

Winter did not come here wholly barehanded.

He kneels beside Tony again, reaches his safe hand out just as before and lays it over the opened metal and the embedded glass, over the rich and shocking red of that fragile life. It flutters, birdlike, as though it can feel the touch. His fingers tremble too. This… this is not the same as protecting Tony from the threat of an earthquake or a fall. It is not the same as rationalizing that Hydra would not want him to kill Tony here before the mission has even been completed. Hydra has nothing to do with it, anymore.

This is nothing less than putting his hand—his _hands_ —where Tony is most vulnerable, seizing him, clawing him back from the brink of death. It is more, and yet at the same time it is less. As far back as he can remember, his energy has been pulled from him; now, at last, it will be used for something that _matters_. His weapon hates this, tightens sudden and vicious and tries to get away from what he would have it do, but whoever Winter is, whoever he is becoming—that man doesn’t care. He can’t let Tony slip away. The feeling that is not fear is so much stronger than the pain.

Winter lays the weapon over Tony’s heart, pins it there with his weight and his other hand, and he _pushes_.

 

*

 

His weapon pushes _back_.

_The agony of installation and the thrashing of an angry needle and he burns but doesn’t even want to run away because he deserves this, he fought back._

Winter recoils violently and catches his full weight on his right arm. He tries not to scream. It’s… it’s a lot. Even more than he’d thought it would be. It is a push and a pull behind his ribs, like his heart is being torn right out of him, and with every second of it his body seems to heat another unbearable degree, working up energy to give away. He is weak and sick with the memory of his punishment, real as the day it had been delivered, but his weapon does not need to do anything to make this process hurt.

Ashamed, he thinks he might not have tried this, had he known beforehand what it would feel like.

But as he drags himself upward, wild, panting, he raises his shaking fingertips again to Tony’s heart. There is something else there that he would not have felt, if he had not tried this: a quieter ebb and flow, like an echo, like an answer.

It’s a lot, but it isn’t too much. It’s harder to force the weapon to _push_ again than it had been when he was ignorant, but he can do it.

He takes a breath, and he braces himself, and he does.

_Anger and fear and hatred, memories that are and are not his, condensed, sharpened, and then none of those things, a yawning void, an overwhelming emptiness:_

_His own mind, a blank white slate upon which to write the orders—_

The weapon has always been right about him..

It is the fear as much as the wash of pain that stops Winter’s hand this time, and he gasps, pants, tries to recover. He is not a blank slate anymore, he tells himself. He is something else, and he doesn’t know what, but he must be, he must be—but even when his weapon hates him, it knows him. It always knows him. It has never been wrong before. They are as close to one as it is possible to be.

The sharpness as it seizes on the victory is lost in the background radiation of pain.

There is an exhaustion in Winter’s limbs that was not there a minute ago or an hour ago or whenever this began, and he feels little more than half conscious. It is harder than ever to think of starting again, except for the way he feels the stronger rise of breath in Tony’s body and he knows he cannot surrender now. Unable to brace himself, he leans in, one last time, and _shoves_ with all the force he has left.

 _Vision tinted silver, an order given in the emptiness of his mind and followed automatically by his own hand, a soft and human throat turning purple and red and then white with the last gasp that leaves it,_ and that’s not true, he can disobey, he _has_ disobeyed, it’s not true _, but those bright and intelligent eyes are turning dim and grey and as blank as the mind that is killing him and Winter can’t see this, he can’t do this, he can’t, he’ll die first_ —

For a moment, he truly thinks he will.

Tony opens his eyes.

 

* * *

 

When Tony feels the telltale quickening of his heart, he doesn’t really expect to survive.

He can’t keep a perfect count of his power levels, of course, not with the gauge still miles away in Reykjavik, but he has a good idea of what he has left. Or rather, what he doesn’t have left. The half he’d lost in the artifact chamber, the little stresses that had chipped away a few hours of life at a time. Tony knows how to keep a handle on himself—he wouldn’t have gotten very far as an adventurer if he didn’t—but he can’t control for everything. With Winter here, he can’t even control for _most_ things.

And now here he is, descending into the one thing he can’t control at all.

The effect of high temperatures on the body is automatic: muscles warm, veins surface to dump heat, and heart rate increases to speed the process. And then, in Tony’s case, the repulsor pump skips and quickens to compensate. Part of him wonders if he might still have enough power if he had controlled himself better before, anticipated the environmental conditions, saved more carefully—

But he didn’t, and he doesn’t, and halfway down the cliff face is too late to go back and change that. It’s too late to do anything but keep going and hope the air begins to cool off.

Tony guesses he’s at least two-thirds of the way down when he feels a stutter in the tension of his rope, like a plucked string, and Winter surprises him yet again; this time, ready for it, thinking more about Winter above than the molten rock below, he doesn’t lose any power to the earthquake. Small mercies, he supposes, but he can’t help feeling proud all the same. Of himself, and of Winter. Winter, who is still trying, even if it hurts him, even if Tony only has vague ideas of how to help. He hasn’t given up, and Tony feels oddly grateful.

He gets to see one last impossible thing before he goes out.

At the bottom of the descent, his limbs feel as weak as though he’d just run a marathon, and his heart continues to pound heedlessly away in his chest. It’s hard, much harder than it should be, to untangle himself from the rope. The air isn’t any cooler down here, or if it is, it’s not enough.

Winter could still get out of here, though. With the right tool. He might still revert, and he might make a lot more people regret Tony’s stupid decisions—but he also might _not_. He hadn’t chosen to kill Howard or any of his other victims. He hadn’t chosen to serve Hydra. Maybe now, he can choose something different.

Tony thinks, as the warm air clouds his vision, as the inaudible click in his chest starts to wind down, about Jarvis who had always wound it back up again. The old man will be at loose ends without a wild charge to look after, he thinks, but he’ll understand. No one else has ever known Tony quite so well.

There’s a chance, and Tony has to take it.

His world goes dark.

 

*

 

And then he wakes up.

He doesn’t know how he survived, but he must have; he is conscious, and he is in pain, and his mouth is full of the metallic taste of alternating current. The heat has become bearable and the repulsor pump is clicking away audibly, evenly.

The repulsor pump should not be audible.

Tony opens his eyes, and Winter is there. Of course it’s Winter, and of course he’s there in the one place Tony had never expected him to be. Who else could have saved him? For a second, all he can see are those water-sapphire eyes, wide and cool, sharp and quick, looking back at him like there’s nothing else in the world to see. It’s an idiotic thought—down here, there _isn’t_ anything else to see—but Tony can’t seem to look away. All that time he’d spent counting power levels and percentages, and the one thing he hadn’t counted on is the fact that Winter has not yet failed to surprise him. They look at each other, and that second dilates wider than the dark.

There is another surprise hidden in the blackness of those pupils: a glint of dim red. An intimate red, an _exposed_ red, a red that should terrify Tony. It doesn’t.

“ _Tony_ ,” Winter says. His voice is rough, like there has been salt in his throat, and it sounds inexplicably familiar. Something in the tone, perhaps, or the shade of that raw accent. Then he swallows, and the calm, accustomed German sound of him returns. “Are you well?”

He does not, Tony notes, ask if he is _functional_. He also does not ask the obvious question, the question that Rhodey and Pepper and Gialetta and every other person to see the repulsor pump has asked.

Perhaps, after such a transgression, he feels he cannot.

“I’ve had worse,” Tony says lightly. For some reason, he doesn’t want to lose the soft weight of hands over his chest, just where they shouldn’t be, but he knows he has to get up. Eventually. “It could’ve been _worse_ just now, but here I am. I… thank you, Winter.  How’d you do it?”

At the question, Winter’s hands dart away like they’ve been burned, and he holds them tightly together in his lap. So much for that, then. Tony levers himself into a sitting position.

“Winter?”

“It was my gift,” Winter says. He sounds almost furtive. His gift—he means the mysterious artifact that can predict earthquakes, see in the dark, and now, apparently, recharge a repulsor pump. Tony is dying to ask, but the man’s tone is as final as it is soft. He doesn’t want to be asked any more questions.

No more questions about that subject, anyway.

“How much time is left? How far to the exit?” Tony asks instead. His body is not yet ready to accept the impossible sensation of a full charge, still too busy complaining that the charge was delivered by improper equipment—if he knows nothing else about Winter’s artifact, he knows that it was _not_ designed to deliver power to sensitive medical devices—so if he can’t get the assurance that they have time to rest, he at least needs the motivation of knowing they _don’t_.

“Ten hours,” Winter replies, wincing, not specifying which question he’s answering. Which means this route is even longer than Tony thought. _Not easy_ —no kidding. “Are you able to walk?”

“I’ll be fine, don’t worry.” Given a little time, anyway. Belatedly, Tony swings the metal cover closed over the repulsor pump and shrugs into his discarded shirts, and then he climbs to his feet. Winter’s grip seems to tighten in his lap, the broken right arm holding tight to the wounded left, and he looks… relieved? Tony shuffles a dozen not-so-good explanations in his head and elects to choose none of them. “Are _you_ okay?” he asks instead.

“I’ll be fine,” Winter imitates. He stands, too, with rather more difficulty.

“Ugh, of all the things you could have learned from me…" But Tony never finishes his sentence. Either Winter was lying, or just lying to himself, but he’s definitely not _fine_. His left arm curls like it’s hurting him, and then his whole body curls too, overcome, for the first time far gone enough to show him the bleak and clouded expression of pain, and Tony—

Tony doesn’t even think about it. He reaches out instantly, instinctively, but not with his hands. It isn’t until after he’s done it that he knows what he’s doing, and by then all the resistance between them is gone, every block and barrier torn down like they had never been there in the first place. The current between them opens wide and uncontrollable.

One more surprise: Tony _trusts_ Winter.

 

*

 

The feeling of it is not the same as it was before.

Mechanically, nothing has changed. There is the same sensation of connection, the same blinding and terrifying and secure closeness with another person, the same knowledge of being laid bare and _seen_. There is the same unison in their heartbeats. The same unison, Tony thinks, except that now when they beat together it is not like a stalking echo but a step in tandem, like a dance— _rhythm_ , he knows Winter calls it. In a few seconds, Tony knows so much more of Winter than he had imagined there was to learn.

Because he _is_ Winter now, definitively. Perhaps he wasn’t a year ago or a week ago or even a few hours ago when Tony first called him by that name, but in this moment, there’s no denying it. The Winter Soldier has all but disappeared, and the heavy wall of ZEMO’s poison is starting to crumble.

What remains is a tangled, damaged mess of thought and emotion, pitted with lost memories and repressed fears, filled back up again with pain and confusion and frustrated longing. It’s a new pattern worked with familiar colors, a beautiful pattern, and Tony feels like he’s seeing Winter for the first time. Maybe he is.

After the first flare of brilliance, just as before, the world comes back into focus around them. They’re still at the bottom of the ravine, and Winter is still standing in the attitude of a man who has nearly fallen. He is further away than he feels.

“Winter?” Tony says. It seems strange to use his voice; Winter looks up at the sound as though he agrees. His mouth works for a second.

“A—“ he says, or it might not be words at all.

He has been weakened, Tony realizes suddenly. There is a flash of memory in Winter’s mind: kneeling over Tony’s body, desperate not to let him die, putting his hands over that exposed core and _pushing_ —and it had hurt, however it worked, and it still hurts him now. A flare of guilt goes through Tony. He hadn’t asked for that.

“What did it do to you?” Tony asks. Winter turns away without moving, turns in on his own mind, and doesn’t answer. Perhaps he can’t.

Well, if Winter cannot speak, Tony can still listen. Drawing on pure instinct, he leans into the circuit connecting them, opens himself to it, ignores the swooping in his stomach like he’s about to fall. He does his best to quiet the loudness of his own thoughts.

He listens, and he hears.

 _Arrived seventeenth June at the_ — Winter is saying, incongruously, but he stops before Tony can figure it out or even truly register the strange, distilled quality of a voice without sound. Winter doesn’t finish the sentence, and his body doesn’t move. For a moment, there is only the tangle of attention turned inwards to show that he’s even still present in his own mind.

“Winter?”

 _Arrived seventeenth June—_ the man tries again, and this time Tony can _feel_ the pain that lances through him and cuts him off. Targeted, vicious, efficient. Tony gasps and tries not to double over himself. He realizes—

It is painful, but there is no surprise in Winter. It is not the first time he has been stifled like this.

What has Hydra _done_ to him?

Winter can’t answer, and Tony can’t leave him like this. He makes himself calm. He thinks.

Tony may not understand completely, they don’t call him a genius for nothing; he does know that something is trying to keep Winter quiet, and he does know that Winter is doing his best to fight back, to drown it out. It’s enough to give him an idea of what to do, if not a perfect understanding. It’s enough to help.

Winter hasn’t asked, but maybe Tony’s telling anyway.

“When I was twenty-one,” he says, but he knows even before the words leave his mouth that he’s doing it wrong. Instead, he focuses, imagines the infinite carry of a whisper in a perfect dome, the pulses like a telegram sent over an electric circuit.

 _When I was twenty-one_ , he starts again, _I had my first real adventure._

The anxious cycle of Winter’s mind stops dead and he looks up slowly. His attention is a hot, burning thing. Tony can sense—

Mainly, Tony can sense that Winter is trying very hard to keep him from sensing anything at all, trying to lick his wounds in private, but he can also sense that when he speaks this way, the pain recedes. Or at least, Winter’s awareness of the pain recedes. Tony has lived with pain long enough to know that sometimes, oftentimes, that is enough. He turns around to recover the rope and give Winter at least the illusion of privacy, and he doesn’t stop talking.

_I’d gotten sick of bodyguards and safe office work, so I left my company with Mrs. A—well, someone I trust—and I bought this little boat. Tiny, really. Not even seaworthy on her own. But I took her out and traveled around, saw new things, kept notes of the things I saw. That last part wasn’t much fun, but it did make it easier to tell the stories afterwards…_

Keeping pace with the words, Winter begins to lead the way along the bottom of the ravine. Tony had rather imagined that they would be climbing up the other side, but he’s certainly not complaining for the gentler path. It’s helping. _He’s_ helping. This won’t be an easy story to tell, but a story that can drown out the pain and block out the heat, a story that can answer the question that should have been asked as soon as Tony woke up—

That story, Winter deserves to be told.

 

*

 

The tentative peace of Winter’s mind allows for a silence of a minute, maybe two, and so for a minute, or maybe two, Tony considers the ways he could give his account. He’s never let this particular tale make it into an issue of Marvels, for obvious reasons, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t thought about it: the sort of breathless prose Virgil would’ve used; the high-intensity suspense Pepper would construct; which details they might omit to turn him into _Tony Stark_ , the stalwart hero or the dashing rogue, the adventurer without weakness. He knows how they would tell this story.

 _It was a hot summer,_ Tony says, calling up the memory, _and I had set out to explore the grottoes of Ha Long Bay. It’s a beautiful place—perfect green waters, thousands of limestone islands covered in vegetation and carved out by the sea. They say it was the ancient dragons who formed those hollow islets out of great emeralds, and I was hoping to find some grain of reality in such an impossible legend…_

He falters. He knows how Virgil and Pepper would tell this story, but here and now, neither one of them can. Here and now it’s only the dark and drifting air, Winter’s fixed attention, and Tony’s own too-honest mind.

 _Really, I was searching for treasure,_ he finds himself confessing. _Not that I needed it—I just wanted to find something no one else had. Despite my fascination with the legend, I still wasn’t much more than a tourist back then._

_Hell, I didn’t even know I had a heart condition yet._

And that—that is the truth only Jarvis has heard before, and then only because he’d been the one to find Tony right after it happened. Tony shakes his head, trying to hide the way that selfsame heart is pounding in his chest.

That heart, so lately held in Winter’s hands.

It’s still a shock to find that Tony trusts him.

But Winter is still listening, still walking, leading the way around a bend and into a downhill grade. If telling this story helps him keep going, then Tony can keep going, too.

 _So I didn’t know much yet, but I was about as stubborn as I was naïve. I took that little boat out to the islands almost every day, whether or not Jarvis came with me, and I learned my way around, explored every corner I could…_ Here, the words come faster with excitement; they are almost easy. _Some of the caves were barely divots in the limestone, but others were so vast it seemed like they shouldn’t even fit underneath the islands. It could take hours to find the ends of them, and I loved it. I’ve often thought that those days exploring would’ve turned me into an adventurer no matter what happened next._

_And there was one cave that just… stole my attention. When I first found it I was bitterly disappointed—only a tiny pocket of a cave, after half my day was spent getting out to the island? I was about ten seconds away from writing the whole thing off and heading back when I realized that I was dead wrong._

_In the back of this little cave, there was a place where the stone didn’t quite meet the water. The barest gap, shadowed and almost invisible… so of course I got as close as I could to investigate. I found that if I lay down in my boat, I could just ease through under the highest point, and it wasn’t long before it opened up again. When I stood up on the other side of the archway, I was in a cavern more spectacular than any I had encountered yet. It was the kind of place that would make anyone else_ believe _the legend of the dragons, deep and winding and full of the most fantastic erosion formations you’ve ever seen—_

_I see them._

It’s Winter’s voice, his distilled mental voice, and it comes with an amazing realization: Winter _can_ see. Probably not like the photo Tony wishes he’d taken, and definitely not any better than Tony’s own recollection, but somehow their connection has deepened enough that he can. It’s more of the story than Tony had thought he’d be able to tell, and he likes it more than he thinks he should. He probably shouldn’t like it at all.

 _They are beautiful,_ Winter tells him, unaffected but effortful; the excitement sours a little. Winter needs him. Time to keep going.

 _Yeah, they are_ , Tony says. He picks his way over a ripple of stone and grins wryly. Takes a deep breath, though these silent words do not need it. _Beautiful, deadly, utterly fascinating, and I got too caught up in them for my own good. Story of my life, I suppose._

_I have no idea how long I spent exploring those formations. Hours, probably, but I wasn’t keeping track. I just know that by the time I was feeling tired enough to head home, the little gap I’d come in through was impassable for my boat. The water had risen high enough to completely cover the way out—_

Winter’s mind shudders. After these hours, Tony can guess why.

 _I was fine, I would have been fine,_ he assures quickly. _The cave was enormous and stable, and there were long stretches of dry land further in—and of course, the tide always goes back out again. Six hours more, maybe, or a little less, and I would’ve left just as easily as I’d come in._

 _But you didn’t_ , Winter finishes bluntly.

 

*

 

Inhale.

One cave is not like another.

Most of them are limestone, sculpted by the slow process of water and wind and time. They are full of pale stone and delicate crystalline shapes worn down and built up over the ages, full of ancient and still-flowing rivers, full of the little living things that learn to take shelter in the dark and to grow where nothing else does. They are like the depths of the oceans: entire worlds, invisible and lightless below the surface.

Tony has seen many of these worlds in his time adventuring. He has explored them, and he has found treasures natural and artificial hidden within, and he has always found his way back out again.

The caverns beneath the volcano are not made of limestone.

They were not formed by the slow deposits of shell and coral and bone, and they were not carved by gentle time. This place was made in a few short hours or days of violence, by the upheaval of the earth and by the outpouring of fire and liquid stone and by the burning rivers that delve tunnels to be found fait accompli, incomprehensible and complete. This place was not formed; it was _forged_. It is the surface of the sea, frozen in the act of a storm.

In this way, one cave is like another: stillness does not promise safety.

Exhale.

 

*

_No,_ Tony says, _I didn’t leave easily at all_.

The air is cooler here, or he just feels cold. He’s being honest, now.

 _It would have happened anyway,_ he says. _Yinsen told me that afterwards. No matter where I’d ended up, however ready I’d been… I had managed to live twenty-one years without ever guessing why I got tired and short of breath so easily, or why my heart sometimes skipped a beat in my chest, so of course it had to come back to bite me at some point. Being in that cave just made it worse._

_Or better, depending on how much you trust me._

Here, there is another twinge in Winter’s mind, and Tony feels a pang of helplessness both new and old; palliation is enough, except when it isn’t. He will not let himself ask, and so he pushes on instead, fulfilling what need he can.

 _I wasn’t much of an adventurer yet; my heart rate went through the roof when I realized I was trapped, and it took me way too long to figure out that I wasn’t. Only, once I_ had _figured it out, I still couldn’t seem to calm down. I drank water, I rested, I tried to control my breathing, but my heart kept racing no matter what I did, and it started to hurt. In retrospect, I suppose I must have been feeling weak for a while before that, or numb, or lightheaded… but the memory isn’t clear. It got harder and harder to concentrate, and I knew I didn’t have much time._

_The one clear idea in my head was that Jarvis would know what to do, if I could get back to him. So I steered the boat to the entrance again, or as close as I could get in high tide, anyway, and I tried my best to take deep breaths. I’m pretty sure I knew it was a stupid plan even then, but I couldn’t come up with a better one. I could only feel, and act. I dove in._

_I remember hitting the water. It was cold, shocking. I remember losing my sense of direction and finding it and losing it again. I remember submerging into the dark…_

But Tony knows better than to dwell on this part, much as it dwells stubbornly in the back corners of his mind. He isn’t telling this story for his own benefit. That, too, he remembers well.

 _I did get out_ , he says to Winter’s uneasiness. _Next thing I knew, I was with Jarvis, in the house we had taken on the beach. He had found me washed up on the shore, half alive, too precarious to move further than the porch. I would never have made it to a hospital, would never have survived at all, except that a man named Ho Yinsen was willing to come to me._

_Yinsen was the one who kept my heart going, steadied the skips in the rhythm, used my own equipment to build the repulsor pump that’s kept me alive ever since… the man was utterly brilliant; I couldn’t have designed it better myself. All I could do was cover it up._

“How?” Winter asks. Aloud but not loud, his voice is startling; he speaks quietly, as though any thought or word too loud will attract unwanted attention. Tony cannot help the same fruitless thoughts he had hours ago, when he was trying to get away from this man: ways he might study and influence the brain, people he might ask for help, the things he might say to persuade them.

He’s not trying to get away, this time.

 _I designed a steel cover plate that could be fitted without welding—_ he begins to answer, but apparently, that’s not what Winter means.

“No, I—“ Winter whispers. “How did you get _out_? How?”

Oh. Of course.

Tony doesn’t look at him; keeping his eyes on the featureless darkness ahead is difficult, but it is easier than his next words. The response he can give is just as much a question as an answer, another way of asking _do you trust me?_

But then—Winter _did_ ask.

 _Jarvis would probably tell you that my idiotic plan succeeded,_ he says. _Maybe he’s right, I don’t know. I think I would have said so when I was twenty. I didn’t believe in much of anything back then. But there was a dream, one I still have sometimes, before I woke up with Jarvis and Yinsen…_

 _In the dream, there’s a huge creature with me in that cave, more massive than any living thing I’ve seen before, powerful, scaled, grey and shining as Damascus steel. It looks at me with great dark eyes, comes close enough that I can feel warm breath and quiet sound. For a while it’s like neither of us can move, or maybe neither of us want to. I know that the creature sees me, and I know that it’s speaking to me, but I can’t understand the words—I’m not even sure that they_ are _words._

_And then it touches me, and I wake up. I always wake up, then._

Tony chances a look to the side, hoping that Winter hasn’t just decided he’s crazy. He knows he sounds crazy. Beside him, Winter is half focused inward, on the thing inside that hurts and terrifies him, and the other half is unreadable. But if anyone were to believe Tony’s story—

 _You know what I saw, Winter, I know you do—you know what I believe I met in that dream, in that cave,_ Tony says fervently. _It couldn’t have been real, but then, I couldn’t have made it back on my own in that condition, either. Sometimes when you chase a legend you find that the legend has sprung up to cover a grain of scientific reality, and sometimes…_

“Tony,” Winter says, soft as ever. Tony trails off. “I see it.”

The smile takes Tony by surprise and overcomes him. There is no word for this feeling—except light, perhaps. He feels light, and he thinks that for a moment, a quiet heartbeat, Winter feels light, too.

_Sometimes, you really do see an impossible thing._

 

*

 

The further they walk, the surer Tony becomes that the growing cold isn’t his imagination, after all. Maybe the heat source lies in another direction, maybe the unpredictable subterranean air currents are working _for_ them now—whatever the reason, Tony can’t deny the gooseflesh of his arms, the dry salt where the sweat of his brow has evaporated. Concrete signs that _something_ has changed.

But this, of all moments, is not the time to look a gift horse in the mouth.

The temperature is getting better, but Winter isn’t.

The man hasn’t stopped walking, and he hasn’t stopped listening attentively to Tony’s story, but he hasn’t stopped flinching away from that thing inside himself, either. This has been a holding pattern from the beginning, and it can’t hold forever.

It can hold just a little longer, though.

_Recovery from the heart trauma and the surgery didn’t take long. I pushed it more than I should have, probably, but I wanted to get out there again. I wanted to learn more, see more, do more._

_And most of all, much as I knew the repulsor pump had saved my life, much as I knew I owed Yinsen my life, I didn’t want to be dependent on it. It’s kept me alive this long, but there are a few—_ he clears his throat— _obvious drawbacks. So I kept searching, researching. Myths, legends, you name it. Chasing the impossible saved me once, I believed, and it might someday do it again. I looked—_

“It won’t,” Winter interrupts sharply. “Not this time.”

The holding pattern breaks. Tony’s eyes flick automatically, immediately, _cautiously_ to the Cup, still secured in Winter’s straps. Wariness wakes his voice.

“How do you know that?”

“I know because—“ but then Winter gasps, releases a groan of pain that Tony can _feel_ as well as hear. Tony tries to reach a comforting hand to Winter’s left shoulder, only for the man to jerk away before he can get near. “I know because I _tried_ , Tony, I tried. You were _dying_ , and you said this artifact was for healing—but when I gave it to you, it didn’t work.”

“Didn’t work?” Tony’s tongue darts out, as though there might be some aftertaste still clinging to his lips. “You mean you made me take—“

“No—I mean, yes, I did try to make you, but—“

“But _what_ , Winter?”

“It just—it _wouldn’t_.”

An image, passed back the way Tony had so recently learned to do: _the first thing he had thought of, the first thing he tried, kneeling and terrified beside Tony’s body_ — _he had been ready to give it away, hadn’t even questioned it, but it hadn’t poured. It just hadn’t poured, like it was stuck, like it couldn’t._ Tony’s grip slips a little on the lamp. No unmagical Cup would have such a restriction.

“So it’s real, then,” he breathes.

“But it didn’t _work_ ,” Winter insists. He stops altogether, then, and Tony remembers viscerally what it had been like when he was overcome before. It is not his memory.

“Winter, are you—“

“It didn’t work,” Winter says, “so I used my gift instead.”

He says it like it is a explanation, in and of itself. He says it like it kills him to say.

“I don’t understand, what is—“

But Tony doesn’t get his answer. Before he can even finish the question, Winter falls to the ground as though struck, too suddenly for Tony to do anything but drop the light and follow to his knees.That mind, tormented and beautiful, vanishes as though hidden behind a screen. Winter is still there, still breathing, Tony can _see_ him, but he can’t feel him anymore and there’s no reason why he should be—

And then Tony feels it.

Something _else_.

That anguish that has lain, inextricable, in the depths of Winter’s mind now becomes visible and distinct, powerful and unrestricted. Winter seems to be unconscious, but _this_ is not. It is more sharply conscious, more _aware_ , than anything Tony has ever felt.

 _Winter?_ he asks, warily. The body before him stirs, slightly; the gloved fingers of the left hand twitch, flex, curl. _Winter, is that you?_

The anguish curls up, broadens, _speaks—_ a single emotion personified and given teeth. The answer it gives is nothing like words, and even less like Tony’s wordless dream. It is glee and fury joined into one. It is bloodlust. It is the feeling of a good fight and a hard kill, the power of it, the ecstasy, and the whole world cold and silver, silver, _silver_ —

This is not Winter. Whatever it is, it is not Winter. That left hand curls, curls, forms a tight and trembling fist of its own accord. Tony has to do something.

And the anguish _laughs_.

 _The pleasure of Tony’s limp body beneath it, the feeling of wrapping hard around his throat and_ squeezing _tight, tight, until the blood stops and then the breath, the hunger, the chance to take back what was_ stolen _and thrown away by the Other and then to devour all that remains…_

_No._

Winter fights his way to consciousness like a drowning man fights gravity, and the anguish within him fights _back_. It seizes and twists in his mind, in his body, but the pain can only slow Winter down. He doesn’t give in. His mind locks tight around it, and he pins that thrashing left arm to the ground.

“Tony,” Winter breathes. His face is drawn and pale with effort, but he doesn’t let go. Neither of them is brave enough to speak silently, now.

“Winter, what’s going on?” Tony says. He, too, is reeling. German is harder to reach for than it should be, so he reaches for Winter instead, trying not to demand too harshly. “What the _hell_ was that thing inside you?”

“You shouldn’t touch me,” Winter says tightly.

“Winter—“

“It was my gift.”

His gift—the artifact that senses earthquakes and charges batteries, the one that has saved both their lives countless times, the one that wants nothing more than to kill them both. His gift; his curse.

“ _That_? That’s no gift, Winter, it’s nothing _like_ a gift. It’s a _parasite_.”

Tony climbs to his feet again, and he doesn’t miss the way that left hand twitches at his choice of words.

“It was given to me,” Winter says, like it’s that simple. “When I was first commissioned, I was an effective but inefficient asset to Hydra. Human information retrieval came near to failure.” _Failure_ , he says, as though it hurts—as though he has been punished for failing at what can only mean _torture_. It takes all Tony has to stay silent and let Winter continue. “Then I was sent to investigate the Anóteros crater, and I returned in possession of an artifact that could supplement my deficiencies. It could take some of my energy and give me strength in return. It could tell me things that were impossible to know. And so Hydra gave it to me for my own.”

Anóteros, that night in the dark, the meteor that had been  hollow and empty like something had been taken from it—

And the unendurable being that lives in Winter’s mind, made of anguish, made of death. Telling Winter things he shouldn’t be able to know, accomplishing things he should not be able to do. The story shouldn’t make sense, but it does. It fits together in Tony’s head like a puzzle.

It still does not constitute a gift.

“Winter,” Tony says, as gently as he can, “What Hydra did to you—they might have given it to you, but if you didn’t want it, if you couldn’t—“

Oh.

 _Oh_.

“What?” Winter says.

“Freely given, freely received,” Tony whispers. _A gift_ , the words had said. The words beneath the Cup, the condition.  “Winter, I need to give the Cup to you.”

“It _doesn’t work_ ,” Winter says for the fourth time.

“It didn’t, but it will,” Tony says. “We were just thinking about it wrong. It lets us think _together_ , don’t you see? It has to be a gift—and how else could it be sure? It wouldn’t work when I wasn’t awake to receive it, but if you take it now—“

“ _No_.” Winter says. “I can’t take it. You need it. Tony, your heart.”

“My heart…” He’s not wrong. Tony had come here thinking only of his heart, thinking that this would be the thing to save him, but now the little apple on the side of the Cup is gone. Only one chance left, he’s sure. And yet… when it comes down to it, the choice isn’t so hard. The nice thing, he supposes, is that after years of running from death for a living, he isn’t really afraid of it anymore. He’s afraid of a lot, but he isn’t afraid of death, or of Winter.

“The repulsor pump has some obvious drawbacks,” Tony says, “but it’s kept me alive this long.” He smiles, even, but Winter doesn’t move, trying harder than ever to keep the pain from reaching Tony’s end of the connection. His voice is small.

“How can you want to give it to me?” he says. “I’m ZEMO. I’m… I’m a monster.”

Tony’s own words. He said it in anger and fear, but clearly it has not been forgotten. Shame is an old and familiar sensation.

“You’re not,” he says softly. “You haven’t been for a long while now.”

Winter only tightens down further. His whole body is curled inwards like a spring, like a fishhook aimed at its own throat. He says, “I killed your father.”

A beat.

Two.

Finally, a breath. They each have their own pieces of that puzzle, but Tony hadn’t known until this moment that they _both_ had put them together. It’s easier to take the second breath than he would have expected. This is a story he’s been constructing for hours, now.

The Cup will work, but not for him, and he knows how, and he knows why.

“It’s okay,” he exhales. It’s a relief to say. “No, really, it’s okay. You remember that story I told you in the other tunnel, by the murals? I thought it was about the two men, about how they were put on opposite sides of a fight for no real reason—but I think I was wrong about that. I think it’s about Iðunn and Bragi. See, he was forced to kill her brother, and she had every reason to hate him, I suppose… but she didn’t. She worked with him, and though she was too late to save her brother, she still had the chance to save another wounded man. To heal his wounds, and to… to care about him.

“There’s nothing anyone can do for my father, but I can still help _you._ Right here, right now. My heart may be inconvenient, but that thing is _killing_ you, Winter.”

“Tony…“

“Please,” Tony says. “Just let me help you.”

Winter looks up. His eyes clear a little, focus on Tony’s face. His tangled thoughts seem to smooth, and Tony knows what he’s going to say before he does.

“Yes, Tony.”

“Thank you, Winter.”

He holds himself patiently still as Tony kneels down before him again. Tony is careful, avoiding that arm as he leans in close, as he reaches out and removes the Cup from the leather straps of Winter’s equipment. It is shining faintly, still heavy with the water within, but it is small—a one-time offer, as Tony had thought it would be. He doesn’t change his mind.

“Ready?” he asks. He doesn’t really know if there _can_ be an answer to that, but Winter repeats:

“Yes, Tony.”

And so Tony lifts the Cup to his mouth, and he pours. He can feel in that moment the glow of his choice and Winter’s, the brightness of the connection between them shining like a supernova—

But even a supernova ends in darkness. Their connection pours out with the water, and then the two of them sit in an impossibly loud silence as Winter holds it in his mouth. Those water-sapphire eyes are wide and scared and lovely.

“I’m still here,” Tony whispers. Winter blinks, nods, swallows.

For a second, nothing happens.

Then Winter _screams_.

 

* * *

 

He wakes up, and he is not Winter. He is not the Soldier, or the monster, or the retriever of artifacts, or anything else he has been told and made to be.

He does not know _what_ he is.

But he knows that there is no more pain in his body, and no more stricture in his mind. The freedom is intoxicating. A topiary garden, he had been called, and now he is overgrown and wild. It will take longer to find the shapes of himself among the vines and brambles, but when he breathes the cleaner air, he thinks maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.

Breath is the first thing to return; sound follows after. Harsh, staccato noises invade the peace of his mind, starting quietly, growing quickly enough that he guesses they must always have been loud.

The high ringing of metal on stone.

The lower _thud_ of blows on flesh.

A slither, liquid and quick, of something not quite animal.

And a human voice calling out—

 _Tony_.

Hours come back in a moment, in a cry. He knows Tony’s voice. He does not feel ready for anything, but it doesn’t matter—something is hurting Tony, Tony’s _fighting,_ and he has to get up. It is an effort of will to roll over, as though his body were still weak, and yet when he finally manages to lift and turn and see in the light that flickers from the lamp on the ground, his body surges with a strength he hardly remembers having. He could do anything.

Because it’s the weapon. Tony is fighting the weapon—the weapon is _there_ , meters away, no longer so intimately twisted into his soul—and yet it is not gone, not truly, not yet.

He does not know what he is, but he knows he needs to help. He gets his arms under himself and pushes up—

Again, he falters. There’s something wrong with… no, there’s something _right_ with his left arm. The sleeve is in tatters, and it takes almost no effort to strip away the remains of the leather, to _see_ the arm again. He sees it, and he remembers it. It is clumsier and weaker than it had been minutes ago, but without the cling of the weapon’s diseased muscle, the steel skeleton beneath is pure and shining. He flexes claw-like fingers and twists a ball-bearing wrist, just to test that he can. To prove it. This is his _own_ as the weapon could never be. He fought for it, he earned it back, and it is _his_.

Another sound of pain. Tony needs him.

The light is dimmer than it had been, but it is enough to show him the place where the weapon grapples with Tony, where it coils and strikes like a snake, thrusts like a rapier. Familiar motions: it is looking for a way in.

He cannot afford to let it find one. He focuses, winds his strength, tightens his steel joints, and _lunges_. One sharp, targeted application of his entire weight is enough to tear the silvery mass away from Tony. It is not a victory.

The weapon has never cared to choose a _specific_ target.

They hit the ground together, hard, and he barely has a chance to feel the shock of the stone under his shoulder blades before the inertia throws him over again, tumbles him, confuses his sense of orientation. He tries to keep his eyes on the flashes of silver, but they are behind him, below him, above him. Impossible to track, impossible to guard against. And then—

There is a way in, he knows it, he _feels_ that he has left himself open, but the weapon does not take him.

Like it can’t.

The weapon has never been un _able_ before, just unwilling. Unwilling to leave for a new host from one with so little strength to resist and so many, many chances to taste death.

True or not, there is no time for the realization to sink in; if the weapon cannot take him, it can still kill him. It grasps furiously at his throat, tight and suffocating and awful, bringing back a hundred memories of torment. He can’t take this, not again.

And he _won’t_. He won’t die here.

Certainty guards him; the panic cannot overcome him. Those steel fingers are _his_ and he’ll make them good for something—they clutch at the weapon, catch, tear it from his throat. He gasps. It tries to cling to the skeleton it once belonged to, but he casts it away from him like a rabid animal.

This, too, is not a victory. The weapon cannot seem to take him, but he is not the only one here. In a heartbeat Tony is tangled once again in cold and liquid silver, and once again his voice rings out against the stone.

He does not know what he is, but he knows that the cry makes his heart beat faster.

“You can’t have him,” he finds himself saying, shouting, _promising._ The weapon is strong, and stronger than they are, but it is possible to stun it, and it is possible to limit it. Something about _him_ limits it.

There is only one unique thing about him now. If the Cup drove the weapon out of him once, maybe it can do it again.

He focuses. He breathes.

“Tony, you have to shoot it!” he instructs. English, he registers dimly. It doesn’t matter.

“I—I’m a little busy!” Tony calls back. “And anyway, it—it just—doesn’t— _work_!” The weapon gets a whip around Tony’s throat and the words stop, and then there’s no more time to plan. He throws himself right at the center mass of that metallic brightness.

This time, he cannot separate the weapon from Tony, but he can take them both down, throwing flesh and silver together to the black stone floor. The impact sounds painful; he hopes that it is. He fears that it is.

In the moment of shock, it is possible to dislodge the weapon from Tony’s body. Tony breathes, whimpers.

Regret is not new. More still of the old memory returns.

But there is only so long that he can hold the weapon like this, even with a steel arm it cannot destroy and a body it cannot take again. It will not be in shock forever. It will steady in a second, a millisecond, and then it will kill him, and then it will kill Tony. The Cup is still lying where they let it fall, but there is no _time_.

Tony is getting to his feet.

“Shoot it _now_ , Tony!” he commands. Tony’s left hand goes automatically to his gun, but his eyes are wide and frightened. Truly frightened.

“It won’t—“

“It _will.”_

And Tony fires. The sound and the shockwave are enough to ring in his ears and the damaged light finally shatters, but he moves on instinct, without thinking—he dives at the Cup and forces the stunned and trailing silver into it, _pushes_ and does not relent. He has only a second, and he uses every beat of it to the full.

The second lasts an eternity, and then it’s done.

With a sound like a flare going off the Cup seals as it had sealed before, in but not out, the weapon trapped inside. A faint light begins to emanate from the horn. Not the same light as before—it’s silvery, and sickly. It’s not enough to see the way on.

It is enough to see Tony’s face.

They’re both winded, both hurting, and Tony has a whole new set of bruises and cuts, and their minds are two and divided once more, but they’re both _here_ and they’re both still alive. Tony grins haphazardly.

“Whoa,” Tony says. “You know, I don’t feel _nearly_ so bad about shooting you anymore. Nice work, Wi—“

He knows he flinches a little, though he does not mean to. He knows Tony sees it, because he stops. And Tony…

Doesn’t ask. Doesn’t demand. Just smiles a little more softly, that same kindness in his eyes that had uprooted the world only hours ago, and now it does it one more time.

“Tony Stark, at your service,” the man says, holding a hand out in offer.

A pause. A breath. But here in the dark, with the pain settling in and the older memories trickling in behind, there is finally an answer to give.

“James Buchanan Barnes at yours,” he replies, quick and sure. His smile is rougher than Tony’s, but it fits him like an old, warm coat. Blue, he thinks. It feels good. “Friends call me Bucky.”

And this, at last, is _right_.

Bucky takes Tony’s hand.

 

*

 

It is a relief when Tony is the one to lift the Cup from where it has fallen, and a relief to find that they do not need such a dim and untrustworthy light. They walk on in near darkness, only a few paces apart, following Bucky’s memories and the echoing sounds of their footsteps. He knows the way, or at least he thinks he does—and in a way, it is also a relief to find that his memory is neither the haze of ZEMO’s amnesiac poisons nor the steel trap of the Winter Soldier’s protocols.

Bucky cannot give the story of his past like Tony could—he is not honestly sure that he can give it at all—but there is something unsatisfied within him that urges him to try. It is no longer the imperative to give a mission report, but it is a new kind of need—or maybe an old kind. Tony had told him a story, and now he tells one in return. In rhythm.

And so he speaks into the uneasy darkness,

“I—I was a soldier before, in the War. A specialist, I guess. On a kind of… an advance team, going after Hydra, behind the lines—“ The words seem to tumble and stick in his throat, inarticulate English. German comes a little more fluidly, but not much. “There was a mission in Austria, and we thought we were ready, we planned, but they were… I…”

“Hydra was expecting you,” Tony finishes quietly. He matches Bucky’s language, and he says it like he _knows_ —and maybe he does. Tony worked with all kinds of people in that war, Bucky remembers; he must have heard all kinds of stories. Somehow, that makes it easier. The tangled sounds leave Bucky in a rush, and he breathes.

“They—they captured me,” he says. “Not hard, after they ruined my good arm. I tried to… I escaped, almost, and they were _impressed_. Knocked me out and gave me—they injected me with ZEMO on the same day.” The words fall into silence, but it is not truly silence. Already Bucky can hear the distant, restless sound of water, feel the chill in the air and in the steel of his shoulder. He wonders if Tony can sense the coming danger, too.

He wonders about everything going on in Tony’s head, now.

But the unsatisfied urge to _tell_ is still there.

“It didn’t work, the first time,” Bucky says, and a touch of wry humor makes the words easier to say—for a moment, at least, he imagines he has a pretty perfect idea of what that makes Tony feel.

“What? Say that again!” he exclaims. “What do you mean, didn’t work? Was there something wrong with the compounds, or is there something about you—“

“The arm,” Bucky replies. “Broken pretty bad, I thought, but I… Nerve damage, it turned out. Right here,” he gestures to the point, just below his shoulder. “Hurt day and night, and they couldn’t make me ignore it. It was—grounding. Helped me fight back.” He breathes, and breathes again, and tests his footing before he shifts his weight into the next step. “So they took it away from me.”

At his side, Tony swallows, releases a rough exhalation, and swallows again. A man who has seen his own heart beating has no call to be horrified at something so simple as an amputation, Bucky thinks—

“You don’t have to tell me this, if you don’t want to,” Tony murmurs, “but I’ll listen if you do.”

But such a man might, perhaps, feel a different sort of empathy.

“I know you will,” Bucky says. One more deep inhalation. He dares a glance at Tony, at his bright eyes reflecting the wan light of the Cup, and he exhales. “I had to learn to take pain, so they—they did both at the same time. Took the arm, and g—forced ZEMO on me. It was…” There are no words in English or German for what it was, but the shine in those eyes says that Tony does not need to be told. “And I… my arm hasn’t hurt at all, since then. I learned to ignore when it hurt, to ignore everything but the mission, and I _did_ …”

Bucky’s words disappear into an ever-nearing sound of water. The inside of his head still feels jumbled, out of order, and the bad memories straighten themselves out so much more clearly than the rest. There are a hundred, a thousand pains, little and large, every one of them pushed away until—

“Bucky?” Tony’s voice is asking. Quiet, sharp enough to catch attention, just a little worried—and the first time he has said Bucky’s name aloud. All at once, Bucky can’t think about anything but _him_. It feels… it feels the same, almost, as when Tony had first looked at him and called him _Winter_. It feels like Tony _sees_ him completely, then and now, and it feels like he cares. It feels satisfying.

“I’m here,” Bucky says. “You brought me back.”

 

*

 

Cave echoes can be deceptive; they know they have arrived at the water when they feel it begin to lap at the toes of their boots. For Bucky, it is strange to come to it with no weapon at his side to gauge the depth, to hold fast, to tell him certainly that this way will lead on. Strange, but not bad.

Freedom is not valuable because it is _safe_.

“So,” Tony says lightly, “I take it that it was the _water_ part of my story that made you so uncomfortable, not the _deadly peril_?” It feels good to laugh, for once.

“Reactions can have more than one reason,” Bucky replies.

Laughter helps him to bear the fact that Tony has lived in fear as much as he himself has lived in pain. It helps him to focus on the present. He came this way before, not so long ago.

“This is an underground river,” he explains. “It cuts across the path and runs through several different chambers, I think, but you have to go under to get to any one of the others. When I came through before, I tied my rope to a rock and threw it in—climbed the rope down, eased back up on the other side. The surface is nearly still, but the channel narrows quickly, and the current beneath is swift.”

“How encouraging,” Tony says.

“It should be,” Bucky says. “This time, we’ll be going _with_ the current.”

“ _Excellent_.”

There is some real nervousness in Tony’s humor, too—Bucky has seen his memories, and he knows that Tony, too, has no very fond recollections of being driven underwater for his escape.

This time, there will be no dragon to save him.

“I’ll stay close,” Bucky says, though he knows he isn’t much of a substitute. Gently, he rests his right hand—the warm and ordinary one, the one no longer broken—on Tony’s shoulder. He is not sure he is allowed to touch Tony, but he wants to do it now, before they go into the cold that will be so much more dangerous for Tony’s two human hands.

“You’d better,” Tony says. “Now, where’s that rope?"

It takes a minute to find, hunting around the subterranean banks of a river, but the Winter Soldier had been nothing if not methodical; the end of the rope is still tied to a second rock some meters back from the water for precisely this purpose. The Soldier had not known of any other way out, and so he had prepared this one.

The danger, of course, had been irrelevant to him.

“Tie down anything you don’t want to lose,” he tells Tony, and Tony double-checks the arrangement of objects inside his leather pack—shoving more than a few into what looks like a water-sealed pouch—and then readjusts the fastenings and tucks the Cup into the harness at his waist. Bucky has little to take care of himself, having used up or destroyed most of his supplies in the time he was trapped up above, but he flexes his claw-like left hand, preparing his grip.

“Ready?” he asks.

“My camera better survive this,” Tony grumbles. He doesn’t really sound ready, but Bucky doubts they have time to wait until he is. Katla has been quiet for hours, ever since the descent into the ravine, but it’s anyone’s guess whether it’ll last. The two of them breathe carefully, oxygenating themselves as best they can, and then they plunge.

 

*

 

It should be simple. It should be short. A couple meters of submersion to pass under the stone ceiling, and then they come up again. It shouldn’t be easy, but it shouldn’t be any worse than the Winter Soldier’s memories.

In reality, it is cold, and dark, and loud, and Bucky loses track of all but the rope instantly.

He loses himself, but he keeps going.

Hand over hand Bucky takes hold of the rope, fights the current, fights to keep the air in his lungs. Even without his sense of orientation he can climb down toward the riverbed; the rope itself is a direction, if only in two dimensions. It can be enough. Sometimes, a touch of something warm brushes his hand or his body and tells him that Tony is still close behind.

Sometimes—rarely.

Mostly, Bucky is alone, isolated in the roaring darkness of the river, unable to count time. The cold begins to bite through the steel of his shoulder. His lungs begin to ache.

When he thinks they’ve finally gone deep enough to clear the stone ceiling, Bucky uses his left hand to lock himself in place and reaches his right along the rope to find Tony’s, to still him there as well. To wait. He wishes he could tell whether Tony’s hand trembles in the water, whether his fingers have yet gone numb.

A heartbeat. Two, three. Brief and endless. The current sways the two of them on their rope like a strand of seaweed. They’re almost beneath the next chamber, Bucky thinks, when suddenly Tony’s grip falters beside his. Falters, slips, disappears—and then he truly is alone.

 _No._ He’s come too far to lose Tony now.

In haste and terror, it’s Bucky’s steel hand that darts out, unslowed by the cold. Unweakened. It seizes Tony’s wrist, locks, and does not release even when an impact like stone reverberates through the connection. They must be in the right position now; as soon as Bucky is sure of his grip, he loosens his right hand on the rope, allows them to rise toward the surface.

They need air, and soon.

But if they go too quickly, they’ll be dashed on the rocks or lose even more precious air to the battering current. It has to be a controlled ascent. Bucky can’t see, can barely think, and he can feel the palm of his right hand burning hot despite the cold water, but he knows that much. He will keep them safe.

Heartbeats are minutes, minutes are hours. At last, Bucky and Tony break the surface together, both gasping with relief as much as the thirst for air.

They survived. They made it.

It is still dark, and it is still cold, but _they made it_. For a minute that might be an hour, all they can do is breathe.

“Are you okay?” Bucky manages finally, dragging them both up the blessedly motionless riverbank. His ears are ringing in the quiet, burning with the evaporation of cold water, and it takes him far too long to disentangle the metal fingers from Tony’s wrist.

He thinks, perhaps, he doesn’t really want to.

“Yeah,” Tony says. “Yeah, I’m good.” But something in his tone—

It takes only the short scramble up the riverbank for a hiss of pained breath to give the lie to Tony’s words. Bucky does not quite let himself sigh. This is the kind of thing, he’s coming to understand, that Tony lies about rather often.

“What is it?” Bucky asks him.

“It’s nothing, it’s—“ Tony is a stubborn man, but he concedes to the invisible glare that he must know Bucky is giving him. “It’s my right ankle,” he says resignedly. “I hit something, I don’t know what. The arch, maybe. It doesn’t even hurt that bad. I’ll be _fine_ , Bucky.”

“Sure,” Bucky says, and proceeds to ignore him. He uses his human hand, the one with nerves in it, to reach out to Tony’s leg in the darkness—Tony hisses, and Bucky knows he’s found the correct limb. More carefully, then, he makes his way down to get a proper feel of the injured ankle. The wet leather that covers it is cold under his rope-burned palm, but beneath the chill he can discern warmth, softness, like the joint is thinking of swelling up but it hasn’t started yet. He squeezes ever so gently, testing; nothing grinds under his touch, and Tony doesn’t make any new sounds of pain. At length, Bucky is satisfied. “You’ll be fine,” he says, and Tony huffs at the sound of his own words.

“What do you even need me for?” he quips.

“You know where you keep your bandages,” Bucky returns. Tony snorts.

“Well, at least I’ll be useful to _one_ of us.” For a minute, the air between them contains only muffled curses and the sound of Tony rummaging in his soaked pack, searching for the roll of gauze that, while wet, should at least be able to provide some pressure to the injury. In the darkness, it takes him a few minutes to dig it out and begin to unroll it.

In the darkness.

“Tony,” Bucky says carefully, “Where is the Cup?”

A pause, more than surprise—Tony’s hands stop moving where they’ve begun to wrap gauze around the flexible leather of his boot. Then, deliberately, they start again. Tony takes a breath, and Bucky does his best to do the same against the lump that’s crept into his throat.

They both know he isn’t really asking about the Cup.

“Oh!” Tony says, not sounding even a little surprised. “You know, you said to tie down anything we didn’t want to lose, but I guess I didn’t do a very good job. It was pretty chaotic down there, you know.”

All the breath goes out of Bucky in a rush.

It’s gone.

It’s really gone.

Part of him is panicking, screaming inside—the part that remembers what it was like to depend on the weapon, to need it, to protect it for Hydra’s sake even more than his own, perhaps even to love it, in some broken, inside-out way—but the rest of him, the bigger part, knows that those feelings are only memories. They won’t leave him, but they don’t control him, anymore.

“Too bad, I guess,” Bucky manages. “But for the record… I think you did your job just fine.”

Bucky doesn’t know how his tone comes out, and he has no idea whether he’s succeeded in schooling the fluttering pitch of his voice, but he does know one thing:

He doesn’t sound disappointed. Not even a little.

 

*

 

It takes a long time for the pure, final absence of the weapon to sink in, but not long at all for the dark to get to him.

Without Tony’s lamp or the Cup, the darkness is complete for the first time in hours—the first time in years, maybe. The first time since that moment when the weapon took him and turned all the shadows into distances and weak points and pain. In a past life, Bucky thinks he would never have admitted to a fear of the dark, but now he can confess it freely.

It is dark, and he is afraid.

“It’s a maze,” Bucky says quietly. It makes no difference to open his eyes, to turn and face the way on, but he does it anyway. “I don’t know if I… if we can…”

Beside him, Tony has finished his wrapping, and he moves loudly, obnoxiously loudly—telegraphing his motions as best he can without the benefit of sight. He shifts in close enough for Bucky to feel the warmth of his body, close enough almost to touch—

“Hey,” Tony says. “Give me a hand?”

And then he does touch.

Tony puts his left hand directly on the steel arm, slides down to the fingers, claw-like and barely articulated. Gently, though this arm is anything but soft. It can only be psychosomatic, but Bucky imagines he can feel the warmth of that touch all the way up to his shoulder.

“Of course,” he says, just a little faintly. He uses the metal hand, the one he chose, to lift Tony unevenly to his one good foot, helps him to balance without putting weight on the bad one. They’re close together, and it feels good in a way Bucky only barely remembers—the good of helping another person, of being useful, of being a support. It’s only when Bucky has him completely vertical that he realizes Tony will still need him to walk, and even without the warm feeling in his chest, he would never have been able to turn away from that need. It’s not in him. “C’mere, Tony,” he says, and he begins to arrange their bodies together, propping up Tony’s weak right side with his own shoulder.

Tony, ever independent, fights the assistance little enough to confirm what Bucky had already begun to suspect: that Tony knows exactly what he’s doing to him, and he’s doing it on purpose.

“You know,” he says drily, “if you wanted to give me a hug, you could have just _asked_.” Tony gives a curse under his breath that sounds suspiciously like the word _smart_ and then turns their contact easily into a real embrace. Brief, still dripping wet, but perfect.

Despite the fear, Bucky manages a little, invisible smile for him.

But when they start walking on in silence, getting further and further from the river where they left the weapon, it doesn’t take long for the doubt and the anxiety to creep back in. Not so close to his heart, perhaps, as it had been before, but close enough to get under his skin, into his lungs. Close enough to chill him. He remembers the way through the maze, or he thinks he does, if it’s still there, if it hasn’t changed, but he has no idea how much time remains anymore. He thinks there’s enough—he thinks so. He thinks it, as he _thinks_ that his mind is trustworthy now. He doesn’t really know—

“Bucky?”

It’s Tony’s voice—it would never be any other—and still he can’t help startling. This is why ZEMO had drummed the fear out of him; it makes him less aware, not more. It becomes a vicious cycle.

“What is it?” he asks. He knows the roughness of his voice betrays him.

“It’s _way_ too quiet down here,” Tony says, flicking the metal wrist stretched over his shoulder for emphasis. The sound rings through the tunnel for several seconds before it dies away. “Want to hear another story?”

Nothing could be worse than the silent dark, Bucky thinks.

“Sure,” he says. “You were—earlier, you were going to tell me about your other adventures.”

“So I was,” Tony agrees, “But all my big adventures are published in the magazines, you know? I bet you’ve already read about half of them, right? Tell me I’m wrong.”

The show of arrogance is enough to pull another smile out of Bucky.

“Just one or two,” he lies.

“One or two!” Tony puts on a show of injury that would probably be a lot more convincing if it weren’t pitch dark, sagging into Bucky’s side and sighing dramatically. “Just one or two! I’ll change that name with you, Horatio—“

“Weren’t you going to tell me a story?” Bucky says, and Tony makes another wounded noise.

“Fine, since you asked,” Tony says. There’s a smile in his voice, and while they’re both still pretty soaked, his body is starting to feel warmer against Bucky’s. “I was thinking of telling you something a little older. It’s less polished, maybe, but I think it’s a good story anyway.”

“I thought you said Vietnam was your _first_ _adventure_ ,” Bucky objects. Tony flicks his metal wrist again, and this time, somehow, it doesn’t sound quite so eerie.

“Yeah, it was that,” he says. “But that doesn’t make it the first thing that ever _happened_ to me, you know. So, years before I ever decided to buy a ridiculously tiny boat, I lived at the family home in Manhattan...”

 

*

 

Tony’s storytelling may be less polished this time around, but it is no less powerful. His words surround Bucky in the dark, distracting him, enrapturing him; they drive away the shadows and the fear. Bucky finds both muscle and hydraulic relaxing automatically, gentling his grip on Tony’s shoulder.

But this story is so much more than just a distraction.

Bucky’s recollections of this time period are still more nebulous than the rest, piecemeal, but the more Tony describes his own past, the more Bucky’s returns to him: a time before the ravine where he had been Winter, before the dead-end passageway where he had been the Winter Soldier, before even that prison in Austria where he had been nothing at all. A time when both of them, in truth, had been different people.

Together they go back, and together they go forward into the maze. Their minds are no longer touching, except for the way they are.

This less tangible connection seems more frail than the other, vanishing into the darkness at the mercy of Tony’s drying vocal cords, but it is in the silence between that Bucky learns that it has strengths, too: the silence between them is silence, not a wall, not a resistor, not a sheet of ice. It is silence, and that is all it needs to be.

But it does not _need_ to be silence. Bucky opens his mouth, and he discovers that Tony is not the only one with a story to tell. Parts of it come in German, and parts in English, but it doesn’t matter; Tony understands it all. In the most basic sense of the term, Tony understands _him_.

This story is harder to recall but easier to tell than the account Bucky had given of his imprisonment, and he thinks it is the better for it. He’d had his own childhood in New York, once, and his own family, and his own friends. His past does not begin and end with that night in the Austrian snow, or even with his posting with the Invaders. There was a time when his name had only ever been Bucky, when the word _Hydra_ meant nothing more to him than a monster in a library book of myths. That time had been long ago, and yet—

And yet as he tells the story, here with Tony leaning on him and closer than the cold, he knows that it is not gone. The thought and the memory remain, and even darkness cannot now drive them away.

 

*

 

Bucky doesn’t recognize the sunlight when it first reaches his eyes, gradual as it is, refracted and diluted around the twists and turns of the maze. Then, all at once, he does.

“Tony,” he says.

“Yeah?” Tony begins, but then he stops. The automatic turn of his head has brought them face to face, eye to eye, _visible_ for the first time in what must be hours. “Bucky,” he says.

For a minute, they can only look at each other.

But before long the temptation of sunlight is too strong, and neither of them can stay still anymore. They don’t run for the entrance, but it’s a close thing—it’s the balance between the difficulty of Tony’s injured ankle and the fear that they will lose the sun before they can find the exit. The rush leads them down a wrong turn, and then a right one, and then—

They’re outside.

It’s a little anticlimactic, really. They don’t fall, and they don’t have to dive through a slamming door, and they don’t leave anything behind that they are not happy to lose.

On the other hand, it isn’t anticlimactic at all. Outside the air is fresh, the wind blows sharp and cold, and the sun skims the surface of the ocean with broad and glowing strokes of gold. Though they burn, Bucky can’t take his eyes off of the sight—his first sight in full sunlight, and the second sight to take his breath away. An endless horizon, and the whole world beyond it.

Bucky has looked at it before; he has stood in this exact spot before. How had he not seen it?

Casting a glance over to Tony, he finds the man no longer watching the slow northern sunset. Instead, Tony has slung his pack around to the front of his body and is digging in it one-handed, muttering to himself about water damage. Soon, he is rewarded with a low sound of radio static. Bucky turns away again.

He can’t help the way his stomach begins to sink. Tony’s weight is present and warm on his shoulder, held and supported, but when this Jarvis gets here, Tony won’t need Bucky for much of anything anymore. It is not something he is ready to lose, and he is not sure that it ever will be.

But Bucky cannot let himself be selfish. He never could.

“You can go home, now,” he says.

“Yeah, I can,” Tony says. Then he smiles, a very dazzling smile, and says, “But _you_ , you can go anywhere at all. Anywhere you want to go first?”

To that, Bucky has no answer. He just turns back to the horizon, watches the sun sink lower and lower as Tony fiddles with the radio and then punches the air when he finally gets the signal he’s looking for. A voice comes over that can only be Jarvis, sounding exactly the way Tony’s memories of him had felt. Exasperated, but fond. Concerned. Loving, in his own way. Tony might not need Bucky anymore, but he will have someone to look after what he _does_ need.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Tony laughs in reply. “Go ahead and take your time, you can pick us up—“ He glances over at Bucky, who still keeps his eyes fixedly, determinedly, on the sea. “Why don’t you pick us up south of Katla, by the beach? We’ll be easy to spot there.”

“ _Us?”_ Jarvis sputters over the radio. “ _We?_ _What exactly—“_

“See you soon!” Tony says, and cuts the connection.

“Tony,” Bucky says. “The beach? Pickup might be easier, but it’s a few miles from here, and your ankle—“

“Will be _fine_. I wasn’t really thinking about pickup, anyway.”

As they watch, the sun dips lower and lower, finally disappearing under the edges of the distant waves. It isn’t a true sunset—they’re too far north and too close to the solstice for the sky to go dark for long, if it goes dark at all—and the half-lit sky looks more like an early morning than a late night. The stone doors of the tunnel creak shut as the last sliver of sun disappears. The end of an adventure.

They start walking.

 

*

 

The walk is long, but not difficult; the hardest part for Bucky is allowing Tony to walk at all. It would be so much easier to carry him, if he would allow it.

Tony never will, and Bucky is satisfied with the press of their shoulders, so by the time they reach the dark shore, Tony’s airship is already visible above the island—though it’s probably farther away than it looks. Bucky wants to think it’s farther away, at least. For the first time in five days, he wants time to slow down.

But it doesn’t, and it won’t. One after another, the waves keep washing onto the beach.

Beside the airship in the sky is the outline of Katla itself, the giant whose uneasy sleep has put them in so much danger. The shapes of the volcano are brutal where the ice reveals them, uneven and rocky, sparsely adorned with silver mosses, and they are beautiful. Captivating, like the loneliness of the moor. It is not so frightening, anymore.

“It didn’t really wake up,” Bucky says.

“Well, sometimes they don’t,” Tony says. “Especially when they’ve got that much glacier on top. Bucky… it takes a lot to break through a barrier like that.”

He doesn’t sound like he’s talking about the volcano.

With a little effort, Bucky manages to get them both lowered into a sitting position, pebbles of ancient volcanic rock crunching beneath them in a satisfying kind of way. He has to let go of Tony’s shoulders to help him extricate his foot from the bandage and the boot, but the sigh of relief Tony makes when his injury meets the cold water is more than worth it. Bucky lets himself face the ocean completely and sag against the man’s left side, a perfect reversal of how they’ve been since the river. A little support is not too much to ask, he hopes.

Tony tenses at the contact, surprised, and perhaps he does not want to touch now that they no longer have to—but then he relaxes, puts his left arm around Bucky as he had before, perfecting the reversal. Takes that steel hand in his own as though he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care how it looks. How it feels.

There are no nerves in that hand, but that doesn’t stop Bucky from having nerves and feelings both as he watches Tony’s fingers play with his. He wants to say, to ask—

Not now. Now, he just wants to hold onto the feeling a little longer.

Bucky cannot say how long that moments lasts, whether it is a minute or an hour or a whole day frozen in the blink of the high northern sun, and he does not truly want to. He hears to the waves crash and he listens to the cycles of Tony’s breath and heartbeat under his ear until the sun begins to rise again, and then he disentangles himself and stands.

A new day.

Another sound begins to add itself to the sound of the ocean: the quiet, high-altitude sound of engines. Tony’s airship. His home has come to them.

“Bucky,” Tony says. He’s looking at the sea the same way Bucky had been moments ago, and he sounds… he sounds like maybe, possibly, he isn’t ready, either. “You’re healed now, and you’re _yourself_ again, and you—well, you could go anywhere in the world, now. You don’t need me for anything.”

He’s wrong about that, Bucky thinks.

“Tony—“

“You don’t need me or anyone,” Tony insists, “but you could go anywhere in the world and I—well, I’ve got an airship that can get to most of those places, and equipment to get to most of the rest, and I know how to find a whole lot of exciting legendary artifacts, if you want, and I guess what I’m trying to say is…”

“Tony,” Bucky says, in a very different tone. They can’t read each other’s minds anymore, but sometimes… sometimes, they don’t have to. In the darkness and the pain they have needed each other and they have fulfilled those needs, but here where they stand on the edge between a minute or an indefinite future, it cannot be need that holds them together. What happens next can only be a _want_ , pure and simple. It is a choice, and a decision—and a question.

Tony meets his eyes at last, and he asks.

“Would you let me take you on another adventure?”

The rising sun turns the sea, the ice, the whole _world_ into glass and flame and the brightness of gold. If Bucky’s eyes are watering, it’s only because of the glare. He is the one to reach out this time, to take Tony’s left hand in his own, to hold it as tightly as he dares.

“Always,” he says.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading all the way to the end! I hope you enjoyed it, and please remember to go give my artists some feedback too—they put in so much work, and everything turned out so beautifully <3


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